Jeannette Catsoulis

Trapped for the most part in featureless rooms, a stellar cast — including Jodie Foster, Benedict Cumberbatch and Shailene Woodley — deliver dull speeches and sift through redacted documents, brows furrowed and lips compressed.

Too listless to fizz and too peculiar to win us over, French Exit, directed by Azazel Jacobs, is hampered by clockwork quirkiness and disaffected dialogue.

Some scenes scrape your senses like sandpaper, while others are so tender they’re almost destabilizing. Together, they shape a picture that’s tragically specific, yet more comfortable with mystery than some viewers might prefer.

A stylized stab at pandemic filmmaking, Malcolm & Marie, is at once mildly admirable and deeply unlikable. Beneath the film’s Old-Hollywood gleam and self-conscious sniping, serious questions are raised, only to lie fallow.

Folding sexual arousal and religious ecstasy into a single, gasping sensation, Saint Maud, the feature debut of the director Rose Glass, burrows into the mind of a lonely young woman and finds psycho-horror gold.

Gamely navigating a script that ushers her from seaside despair to hilltop elation, Watts gives a touching and blessedly understated performance, assisted by Sam Chiplin’s warmly expansive cinematography. As for the bundle of scene-stealing magpies (patiently trained by Paul Mander) who collectively bring Penguin to life, they’re a delight.

This drippy drama presents precisely the kind of prettified portrait of death that Teague’s candid writing sought to rebut.

Strangled by good intentions and teachable-moment clichés, Conor Allyn’s No Man’s Land turns the border between Texas and Mexico into a gateway to racial empathy.

Predictable to a fault, the movie coasts pleasurably on Neeson’s seasoned, sad-sweet charisma — an asset that’s been tragically imprisoned in mopey-loner roles and generic action thrillers.

Adding a fairy-tale cast to a generic horror setup is of no benefit to Hunted, Vincent Paronnaud’s unpleasant merger of slasher movie and survival thriller.

Distinguished by a modestly discreet directing style that allows the actors to shine, My Little Sister offers neither false uplift nor dreary realism.

Dopey dialogue and less-than-scrupulous continuity augment the ramshackle vibe of a movie that’s too inept to qualify as camp or cult.

Set over eight harrowing months, Pieces of a Woman is a ragged, mesmerizing study of rupture and reconstruction. The ending is ill-judged, but the movie understands that while we love in common, we grieve alone.

A muddled mélange of black comedy, revenge thriller and feminist lecture, Promising Young Woman too often backs away from its potentially searing setup.

Wordy and stilted (it was derived from a stage play), this low-budget debut nevertheless benefits from a mesmerizing central performance by Suzan Anbeh.

This extraordinary woman, seemingly incapable of despair through roughly two decades of struggle, remains elusive. There’s something daunting about this degree of implacable selflessness, and it has a curiously flattening effect on a movie that feels less emotionally complex — less enraged — than it ought to.

Electric and alive as few films are, Lovers Rock will make you giddy with longing for a pleasure we’ve been too long denied: The singular rush of being one with a beat and a roomful of possibilities.

Some of Red, White and Blue is hard to watch, but the film is eloquent on how an institution will resist change, perhaps especially from inside its own walls.

A film in which violence and stillness alternate with queasy regularity.

McQueen, who attended one of these schools, uses this small, hopeful story to illustrate how one generation, by means of an ingenious workaround to bigotry, fought to secure the future of the next.

Despite a script (by Chaganty and Sev Ohanian) that sees no need to flavor its tension with flashbacks or character-fleshing, Run has fun with its ludicrous plot.

Propelled by a distinctive style and a potent lead performance, Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal builds a singular tension between silence and noise.

Cemetery is primarily a slow and lovingly detailed immersion in the sights and sounds of the jungle and the mahout’s devoted attention to his animal.

The movie needs Winslet and Ronan’s skills, their ability to semaphore more with sliding glances and tiny gestures than many actors manage with pages of dialogue. There’s pleasure in deciphering these signals.

Vaughn and Newton prove remarkably effective at selling the benefits of their alternate packaging. Their efforts, however, are too often diluted by the film’s lazy plotting and Millie’s hackneyed emotional baggage.

Waffling between anger and pathos, dry humor and dead-eyed violence, Fatman feels tonally befuddled.

Though at times tasteless and barely coherent, the story is oddly affecting, the very strangeness of Nyholm’s folkloric vision and its unnerving execution pulling you in.

Pitiless in its intent, and hopeless in its sense of sorrowful dereliction, The Dark and the Wicked fully earns its horrifically distressing final scenes.