Jeannette Catsoulis

Despite its sense of dead-end desperation, Stray Dolls is made worthwhile by the richness of Shane Sigler’s nighttime cinematography and the consistent empathy of its tone. Sinha, herself a first-generation immigrant, isn’t about to judge anyone for reaching.

Existing outside of time and place, The Other Lamb is a gorgeous revenge fable with an excess of atmosphere and zero subtlety — a mallet wrapped in gauze and girlish laughter.

Tape, in short, is a terrible movie about appalling behavior.

Resistance feels disjointed and dated.

Though the themes of Burden feel uncomfortably current, their execution is leaden and dismayingly artless.

With a warm heart and a nonjudgmental mind, Saint Frances weaves abortion, same-sex parenting and postpartum depression into a narrative bursting with positivity and acceptance.

Oppressively dark and unrelentingly intense, Blood on Her Name packs down-and-dirty performances, and a few surprises, into a tight 85 minutes.

Woods, remarkably comfortable in her first film role, gives Goldie a steel spine and a feisty resourcefulness, her moments of vulnerability rare, but essential.

There is nothing objectionable about Michael Bully Herbig’s glossy political thriller, Balloon, but there’s nothing particularly exciting about it, either.

Every moment rings true, the vividly textured locations and knockabout relationships more visited than created.

Simultaneously rowdy and slick, Buffaloed is exuberantly paced and entirely dependent on Deutch’s moxie and pell-mell performance.

Essentially a geezers-fight-back siege movie (Tom Williamson plays the sole young veteran), VFW is riotously scuzzy and warmly partial to its rusty heroes.

Until its surprisingly effective ending, You Go To My Head keeps its drama under the skin. Like an animal in captivity, Bafort, who is also a model, slinks and lounges with long-limbed grace; but it’s Cvetkovic who holds the movie steady, giving Jake a secretive, worn gentleness that’s tinged with tragedy.

Absurd yet bold, lurid yet a tiny bit touching, Come to Daddy drags poor Norval from hopefulness to horror to a wickedly literal form of closure. More than a few audience members might even be happy to accompany him.

Despite its visual flair and unrelentingly taut atmosphere, The Lodge is more successful in sustaining unease — like the eerie, unexplained shots of a spooky dollhouse — than in building a convincing narrative

Essentially the story of a young woman coming into her power, Gretel & Hansel is quietly sinister, yet too underdeveloped to truly scare. Together, Jeremy Reed’s production design and Galo Olivares’s photography weave a chilly spell that’s regrettably undermined by the opacity of the storytelling.

Unfolding over one acutely distressing workday, The Assistant is less a #MeToo story than a painstaking examination of the way individual slights can coalesce into a suffocating miasma of harassment.

This first feature from Will Forbes is a big slice of ham.

Using shape-shifting as a messy metaphor for sickness and childhood trauma, Stanley and Cage leap so far over the psychological top that they never come back to earth. By the end, my own eyeballs hadn’t changed color, but they must have looked like pinwheels.

Even when the ghost of a point materializes — that recording ephemera can be a self-soothing behavior — VHYes is too unsophisticated to develop it.

Blessed with a trove of 16-millimeter film footage captured during this yearlong adventure, the director, Alison Reid, uses it as the foundation for a far-ranging story of scientific discovery, sexual discrimination and environmental alarm.

Bedazzled or otherwise, clichés are still clichés, and this debut feature from Andrew Desmond is strewn with them.

A numbing torrent of largely unidentified film clips and poorly labeled commentary, Rob Garver’s overstuffed tribute to the life and work of America’s best-known — and most written about — film critic is at times barely coherent.

She’s Missing is slow and dreamy and frustratingly opaque. Yet it has a potent sense of place and an ominous atmosphere of impermanence.

Struggling to connect the filaments of past and present, youth and maturity, Dolan seems lost, his signature vivaciousness and sense of fun almost entirely muted. Instead, what lingers is a feeling of being lectured to — which isn’t much fun at all.

A flawed and fascinating film about fame and martyrdom.

Shot mostly in black and white and with an improvisational feel, My Friend the Polish Girl is cool and clever, feigning social realism with winking calculation.

Filmed almost entirely in real time, and using a series of long, intimate takes, “The Body Remembers” is about privilege and its lack, motherhood and its absence, race and its legacy.