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.

Torn between the maternal and the cosmic, the tactile and the unearthly, Proxima feels as unsettled as its heroine.

The most polished superpower on display in the defiantly unexciting Secret Society of Second-Born Royals is the ability to say its title without spitting.

Wrapping damage and poverty in bubbles and sunshine, Kajillionaire is about intimacy and neglect, brainwashing and independence.

The best, perhaps the only reason to see The Artist’s Wife is Lena Olin, an actor incapable of giving a so-so performance.

The movie observes collective pain with endearing absurdity.

This minimalist survival thriller unfolds with such elegant simplicity and single-minded momentum that its irritations are easily excused.

The characters are so flimsy, and so wearyingly familiar . . . that Michell is incapable of giving their conflicts life.

Distracted by Confederate flags and twerking women, the directors, Andrei Bowden Schwartz and Sam Jones, make only a halfhearted attempt to illuminate a disappearing subculture.

Whether psychological drama or sexual farce — and, really, there’s no way to tell — Sibyl is a soapy mess.

I Am Woman, a pleasant, yet disappointingly trite biopic of the singer Helen Reddy, has a flatness that’s difficult to ascribe to any one element.

Glancing social commentary — like the difficulties of cultural assimilation and the invisible wounds of war — is welcome, but the script (by Ireland and Damian Hill, who died in 2018) is too cluttered for it to resonate and too mired in a muddle of sin and redemption.

Critical Thinking does little to detach itself from genre cliché; yet this heartfelt drama about a rough-and-tumble group of high-schoolers who claw their way to a national chess tournament has a sweetness that softens its flaws.

Leaving aside its cheesy, colorized dramatizations, Jon Brewer’s movie offers a strangely bifurcated portrait.

This exploration of suppressed homoerotic longing would be infinitely more moving if the pair had even a smidgen of sexual chemistry.

The mood is meditative, the camera patient; yet the film is too dramatically shy and narratively slight to stir.

Restructuring some story arcs and jettisoning others, Iannucci and his collaborator, Simon Blackwell, have created a souped-up, trimmed-down adaptation so fleet and entertaining that its cleverness doesn’t immediately register.

Roth is never less than a treat as a woman whose veil of class and privilege is being slowly lifted to reveal her misplaced loyalties. The Crimes That Bind might feel leaden, but Alicia’s transformation feels lighter than air.

This stultifyingly earnest movie makes its points with such a heavy hand that its horrors struggle to resonate.

While Derrick Borte’s filmmaking is bluntly efficient — and the vehicular stunt work impressive — the character is a windup toy, a dumb and dirty symbol of male grievance.

Sultry, but never sleazy, observant yet nonjudgmental, An Easy Girl is more than just a tale of innocence and experience. Taking a nuanced look at sexual awakening and, to a lesser extent, class distinction, the movie has a charming flightiness that builds to an unexpectedly touching climax.

Coarsely merging social-media critique and slasher comedy, this shallow take on the evils of internet addiction is as unoriginal as it is unfunny.

By the end of Howard, it’s the songs we’ll never hear that may haunt us most.

LaBeouf, like his castmates — in particular, the talented Chelsea Rendon from the STARZ drama, “Vida” — is constrained throughout by the weight of the stereotyping and dialogue that doesn’t stand a chance against the violence.

Dazed but far from confused, “She Dies Tomorrow” tugs at you, nagging to be viewed more than once. Eerie and at times impenetrable, the movie (which was completed pre-pandemic) presents a rapidly spreading psychological contagion that feels uncomfortably timely.

The cliché of the volatile chef riding roughshod over his subordinates receives a thorough airing in Nose to Tail, a resolute but finally punishing wallow in self-destructiveness and obnoxious male behavior.

As he proved in his 2017 drama, “Harmonium,” Fukada excels at unfurling near-hysterical narratives in restrained, sometimes icily sterile scenes. But while the earlier film pulled us in, this one repels, its cloudy colors and depressing mood making us long for a single moment of joy.

A thumb to suck in troubled times, Summerland offers a digit of nostalgia that many viewers will latch onto with something approaching relief.

Featuring one of the most dissatisfying, anticlimactic endings in genre memory, this paranoid thriller (the directing debut of Dave Franco) turns an isolated seaside villa into a slaughterhouse.

Burdened by a silly R rating that may deter the very youngsters who are likely to enjoy it most, Yes, God, Yes (written and directed by Karen Maine) fights back with an appealing lead and an overwhelmingly innocent tone.

A gossipy portrait of a charmingly naughty boy whose genius is perhaps best appreciated on a second viewing with the sound off and the eyes wide open.

There is so much recycled material in “Fatal Affair” that its carbon footprint must have been zero.

Every so often, a movie comes along that isn’t particularly good, yet somehow gets to you — even as your eyes start to roll, they can’t look away. “Dirt Music” is one of those, a strangely fascinating delivery system for so much visual beauty that its flaws scrabble to gain a purchase.

Breathtakingly photographed by Mohammad Reza Jahanpanah, Widow of Silence is a movie with a cool head and a sharp eye — one that sees greater hope in the flamboyantly jeweled tones of a carmine head scarf than in the entrenched absurdities of a broken bureaucracy.

Smart, noisy and flashily assured, We Are Little Zombies is entirely, gleefully its own thing.

Relic deftly merges the familiar bumps and groans of the haunted-house movie with a potent allegory for the devastation of dementia.

Unspooling over the course of a few lazy summer days, the film offers an enigmatic examination of youthful alienation, its plot irresolute and unpredictable.

Welcome to Chechnya is a moving and vital indictment of mass persecution.

Subdued and temperate, Skyman refuses to lean into the mystery of Carl’s claims or wind us up for a final resolution. Those elements might be present, but they’re never allowed to obscure what is essentially an empathetic, textured portrait of loneliness and loss.

More tribute than parody, this over-egged farce whips slapstick and cheese into an authentic soufflé of tastelessness.

It feels like an artifact from a particularly contentious past, a stale corn chip trampled into Party-convention carpeting.

Neither bitter nor maudlin, The Ghost of Peter Sellers is a movie about filmmaking and soul-searching, a tale of two Peters and maybe the worst of times for both.

Strange, challenging and boundlessly confident, this tripped-out noir from the Canadian filmmaker Bruce McDonald (best known for his 2009 horror movie, “Pontypool”) is part lucid dream, part drugged-out nightmare.

What’s left is a baroque pantomime, a heavy-handed satire of intolerance whose fun fades faster than the livid bruises on Judy’s face.

The movie accumulates a rueful nostalgia. Soft black-and-white cinematography (by Bill Otto and Carl Nenzen Loven) and low-key humor help offset the limitations of its partly crowd-funded budget, as does the naturalism of the partly improvised performances

Marked by a fierce vitality and vivid emotional authenticity, Papicha thrives on the heat of Nedjma’s anger and the glorious bond among the mostly young female performers.

The High Note is pleasant enough but disappointingly timid and thoroughly implausible.

The result is an exceedingly well-made first feature, a simple genre movie elevated by strong visuals, potent performances and a mood that falls somewhere between resignation and guttering hope.

More curious and combative than the movie around her, Kennedy is as much anthropologist as chef, her deep love for her adopted country palpable.

Despite the ripeness and flammability of its material, the movie feels oddly distant, the screenplay marred by weak scares, graceless plotting and dashed-off characters.

We’ve seen it before: Faces, substances and locations may change, but the self-destructive behavior and dreary vibe are pretty much constants.

As derivative as its title and as implacable as its declining hero, Blood and Money suffers from near-calamitous narrative lapses.

While the movie barrels toward a final act that’s more feminist fantasy than credible conclusion, Bolger’s phenomenal performance locks us tightly on Sarah’s side.

Like a stone skipping on water, How to Build a Girl leaps from raunchy to charming, vulgar to sweet, earthy to airy-fairy without allowing any one to settle. Yet it’s so wonderfully funny and deeply embedded in class-consciousness . . . that it’s tonal incontinence is easily forgiven.

Slow and sweet and unassuming, Driveways, the second feature from the Korean-American director Andrew Ahn, tackles major themes in a minor key.

A demented fetish comedy that escalates to startlingly nonchalant violence, Deerskin (written and directed by Quentin Dupieux) flickers tantalizingly between awful and awesome.

While Silverstein’s commitment to authenticity is admirable (she spent years visiting backyard rodeos across Texas, talking with the participants), her narrative is too tamped-down and languorous to catch hold.

Blessed with shivery setups and freaky effects — here, skin-crawling is literal — The Wretched transforms common familial anxieties into flesh, albeit crepey and creeping.

There’s a pleasing humility and introspection to this Bruce — a ruler no longer sure if his patriotic purpose is worth the carnage. His joints may be stiffer than his resolve; but, in placing the warrior temporarily aside, Macfadyen and his director have helped us more clearly to see the man.

This admiring yet sluggish movie mostly drowns its political revelations in sticky sentiment.

Drawing on a fascination with cults and utopian communities, the director and co-writer, David Marmor, has created a mildly entertaining survival story whose depiction of psychological indoctrination far outstrips its generic dips into torture.

The writing might be a tangle of limp clichés, but the actors — especially Woodley and the terrific Wendie Malick as Daphne’s mother — sweat to sell every line.

Maybe it’s the hell we’re all living through right now, but Tyler Cornack’s orificial fantasy struck me as a hilariously bawdy, intermittently inspired act of vivacious vulgarity.

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.

The result is a sometimes punishingly theatrical experiment that teeters on the verge of surreality, transfixing us with the promise of something terrible lurking just beyond those ratty curtains.

Another ruin-and-rehab tale, one that initially tantalizes then flatly disappoints.

Gorgeous and goofy, fanciful and unrepentantly old-fashioned, this Victorian adventure (it’s set in 1862) delights much more when its head is in the clouds than when its feet are on the ground.

Spraying what seems like several thousand rounds of ammunition, this sturdy thriller (the big-screen feature debut of the director Brian Kirk) has no patience for nuance. It’s a big, blunt, battering ram of a movie, but it’s not dumb.

If Baig’s writing is at times thin and excessively pointed — like a classroom discussion about what it means to live an authentic life — her grasp of mood is spot on.

However crucial and opportune in its truth-seeking and depictions of political trickery (Burns could hardly have known his film would plop into theaters alongside the impeachment hearings for President Trump), The Report is too often dramatically frozen, its emotions stubbornly internal.

Candid and empathetic, the movie’s segments can feel rushed and unfocused; yet they have a ragged intimacy that argues implicitly for an individual’s right to choose, without interference or condemnation.

An unfortunately clunky, relentlessly corny salute to Rani Laxmibai.

At fault is a threadbare, irritatingly vague script (by the director and artist Ben McPherson) that simply strings together a series of generic setups and forgettable characters.

As the camera circles swirling skirts and sweeps through elegant cafes, the director, Alexis Michalik, whisks up a whirlwind of soapy declarations and backstage chaos. For many viewers, that will be enough, with enjoyment in direct proportion to tolerance for theatrical farce and hyper-romantic dialogue — and a lead character who is less engaging than either.

[An] illuminating if one-sided overview of the myriad ways in which women’s sexuality is controlled and subjugated.

A deadpan take on suburban hell — I hesitate to call it a comedy, black or otherwise — the movie takes competitiveness to such excruciatingly surreal lengths that every would-be joke feels agonizingly strained.

Narrative ellipses and a slew of visual clichés — like vague shapes, ghostly footprints and disorienting flashes of light — make Mary (the name shared by the ship and the couple’s younger daughter) a particularly unsatisfying possession yarn.

A charming blend of science and conjecture, Fantastic Fungi wants to free your mind.

Abetted by Patrick Orth’s careful, almost obsessively calm camerawork, Köhler has concocted an uncommonly subtle and deliberately ambiguous work, one that’s delicately rewarding, if you meet it halfway.

A gentle, genial dip into a pool of midlife despair.

A circular firing-squad of full-on crazy, Chris Morris’s The Day Shall Come barges into American counterterrorism tactics with sledgehammer satire and a numbingly repetitive plot.

A weird, erratic and occasionally insightful experiment that, unlike its indefatigable star, never quite finds its zing.

From its spectacularly detailed aesthetic to the characters’ march down well-worn personality paths, Downton Abbey argues insistently for the status quo.

A raft of marquee names — including Seth Rogen, James Franco and Will Ferrell — can’t save Zeroville, a maddeningly surreal head trip through Hollywood history and movie-fan insanity.

Appealing, partly because it’s so unembarrassed by its genre's done-to-death social-injustice themes, this undercooked blend of science fiction and family drama virtually dares you to turn up your nose.

Ms. Purple is a moody, downbeat drama soaked in color and saturated with sadness.

Making the most of his limited budget, not unusual for the prolific Fessenden, he has produced possibly his most coherent and visually polished work to date. The makeup effects and lead performances are excellent, and Fessenden’s signature cheek (two strip-club employees are called Stormy and Melania) never tips into silliness.

Hancock is wasted here, as are the meaty dramatic threads that Elizabeth O’Halloran’s formulaic screenplay never bothers to pull.

Caught between a hero with no personality and a villain with way too much (Fletcher’s slobbering performance has to be seen to be believed), Raymond comforts himself with shots of people gazing pensively at clues and pulling grisly things from drains.

The result might feel overlong and overwrought; yet thanks to Bader’s clever plotting and fruity dialogue — as well as strong supporting players — this grimy picture climaxes more satisfyingly than expected.

Rapace’s jangly, one-note performance is rendered bearable by Yvonne Strahovski’s warmly natural turn as Lola’s increasingly furious mother.

Vita & Virginia takes a passionate, real-life affair between two enormously gifted writers and proceeds to throttle the life out of it.

It’s Weaving who gives this blunt satire of class warfare a heart.

Thematically underdeveloped yet pleasingly creepy, Tigers Are Not Afraid balances its mild terrors with appealing moments of childish creativity.

The movie, like the elemental forces we continue to exacerbate, never explains itself. Surrender to it, though, and a narrative - of spectacle, conflict and retaliation - will eventually become clear.

Socrates isn’t simply about being gay, or poor, or even devastatingly unloved: It’s about honoring a resilience that most of us will thankfully never have to summon.

Somewhere deep inside Driven — Nick Hamm’s based-on-real-life crime caper — lies a fascinating movie.

Freeman, never the most animated of performers, gives his specific brand of passive British miserabilism free rein. But it’s Melissa Rauch, as Charlie’s safely dull, place-holder girlfriend, who steals the show.

What should be a volcano of betrayal and acrimony never fully erupts; even Moore’s brief meltdown feels staged, and Isabel is so irritatingly tranquil that Williams has no room to breathe in the role.

Brian Banks isn’t a great movie, but it is a worthwhile one. And if it’s indicative of a new direction for its director, you won’t hear any complaints from me.

We learn so little about these characters or the forces that shaped them that we’re never drawn into their drearily blinkered world.

Not even John Newman’s distressingly awful dialogue can slow Cage’s roll to a histrionic finish.

Like Alverson’s 2015 character study, “Entertainment,” The Mountain sets forth a profoundly anhedonic vision of America — and humanity — that’s simultaneously upsetting and mesmerizing.

A blistering story of rage and redemption that never fully illuminates the journey from one to the other.

Despite the strange, echoing beauty of its images ... "Luz" is, as a whole, visually numbing and mentally taxing.

I wouldn’t dare to predict who might cough up admission for this; but if watching prostitutes guzzle Twinkies and swallow handguns is your thing, then by all means come on down.

[A] moving drama ... With its quiet realism and almost unbearably intimate hand-held camera work ... "Rosie" holds our hands to a flame of desperation.

A smoothly efficient popcorn picture...Though Scodelario is spunky and game in what must have been an extremely uncomfortable shoot, the script (by the brothers Michael and Shawn Rasmussen) is airless and repetitive.

This is a movie that, like its characters, is more fluent in feelings than in words.

If Petitjean’s dialogue is problematic, its delivery is no less so: at times, the discord between a character’s words and lip movements suggests that some line readings had to be dubbed.

While you might leave with several unanswered questions, the most concerning one is how this fiasco was ever financed in the first place.

Notwithstanding a lively turn from Charles Dance as a chatty brain-tumor sufferer and a perfect Charlotte Rampling as a tranquil guide to oblivion, Euphoria gives up the ghost well before either of its unhappy heroines.

Burdened neither by fresh ideas nor common sense, Gary Dauberman’s lethargic screenplay (he also directed, an inauspicious debut) takes so long to get moving that Annabelle herself should demand a do-over.

Weaving a glancing love triangle into a poignant observation on the waxing and waning of creativity, Serebrennikov revels in radiant black-and-white scenes of urban grit. The vibe veers from grungy to blissful, the characters’ earnest charisma serving as the movie’s force field against criticism.

What’s left is a touching and tragic portrait of a vulnerable work in progress, one that for now might only be visible through a clouded lens.

Always Be My Maybe feels a lot like a movie propped up by a stunt, a high-gloss romantic comedy so mired in triteness and unconvincing emotions that its main recommendation is the appealing diversity of its cast.

As a sales pitch for an undeniably popular program, Q Ball (filmed in 2018) builds a crescendo of hope and good will. Anyone seeking a more substantive conversation on life beyond the basket, however, will have to look elsewhere.

Detailing at once an art project and a rescue mission, a love triangle and an elaborate, outlandish bargain, the movie has a surface serenity that belies its fuming emotions.

The Tomorrow Man is a cloying, at times disturbing tale of two dotty seniors whose eccentricities unexpectedly mesh.

In “Chapter 3,” the violence has been supercharged, and so has the virtuosity. At a certain point, though, the carnage becomes deadening, its consequences no more than soulless tableaus of damage that encourage disengagement.

Its ideas aren’t new, and at times Ruby and Gensan can feel like recognizable symbols of societal failure. What’s different, though, is the performers’ skill in portraying characters whose extreme mutual dependence is touchingly believable, giving no hint of the damage later revealed.

The upshot is an oppressive, inscrutable puzzle that made me more curious about the inside of Alcazar’s head than that of his tortured subject — the kind of movie that, in some circles, might inspire fetishistic rewatching. Just don’t forget to fire up the bong.

While All Is True might not brim with excitement, it’s beautifully acted, richly photographed (by Zac Nicholson) and blessedly free of histrionics. Between them, Branagh and Elton have concocted a respectful story of loss, regret and wistful genius.

An uncomfortable blend of sickness and silliness, this dancing-past-the-graveyard comedy suggests that the many travails of aging can be endured if you only gather enough friends and surrender enough dignity.

The River and the Wall” comes on as innocent and glossy as a travelogue, but its scenic delights are the sugar coating on a passionate and spectacularly photographed political message.

A movie that feels more like an encomium than a thoughtful probe of a brilliantly mutinous mind.

Hyett proves more successful with atmosphere than plot.

Working ostensibly from the viewpoint of Bundy’s longtime girlfriend, Liz Kendall (an excellent Lily Collins), [Director] Berlinger never fully commits. Instead, he appears as seduced by Bundy as virtually everyone else in the movie.

Thoroughly good-natured and with a handful of decent jokes (like Kate McKinnon as a vulpine suburban mom), Family would be more interesting if, instead of trying to rewire Kate, it just admitted that her harsh honesty and benign neglect were more beneficial to Maddie than her mother’s anxious hovering.

Leave it to the feted British theater director Trevor Nunn to flatten the intrigue and dampen the lust that could have made Red Joan zing.

Moody and strange, Fast Color has a solemnity that haunts almost every frame.

Teen Spirit, Max Minghella’s sweet and touching directing debut, is both proudly clichéd and refreshingly different.

Inspired by a 2014 ISIS raid on Kurdish territory, Girls of the Sun, unlike the women who populate it, is weak and often corny.

Marshall, a world away from the dank dread and crawling terror of his 2006 spelunking stunner, “The Descent,” directs like a dog at a squirrel convention, charging gleefully from one witlessly violent encounter to the next. Ian McShane, as Hellboy’s adoptive father, does what he can to calm the chaos, but the movie left me alternately baffled and battered.

The movie’s most striking aspect, though, is Lyn Moncrief’s arresting cinematography, which turns the vast vacancy of the plains into both hostile observer and hellish metaphor. The story might finally slip its leash, but the baleful mood holds firm.

Despite a thoroughly modern central character, this impeccably costumed, wishy-washy period piece feels like it emerged from a PBS storage trunk, wrapped in tissue paper and reeking of mothballs.

Yet underneath the plotting and internecine tussles of the would-be escapees lurks something much more interesting: the story of a seduction.

A tough but essential watch, Roll Red Roll documents how a sexual assault in a declining Appalachian town became an international cause célèbre. Shots of near-empty streets and an abandoned steel mill provide a melancholy frame for behavior that seems horrifyingly incomprehensible.

Randau’s script, though, is an implacable plod from one bashing to another.

John Conroy’s cinematography hustles and heaves, straining to inject a vitality that the story too often lacks. Yet whether in the kaleidoscopic warmth of Jamaica or the gray chill of London, Yardie’s sunlight-filled songs will make your toes twitch.

An old-fashioned wartime romance whose plot highlights are recognizable from outer space, this gleaming dollop of prestige comfort food is neither logically coherent nor emotionally satisfying.

Set in the American Southwest in 1879, The Kid feels less like an actual movie than a table-napkin idea for one.

Ethereal, intensely moving.

Though hobbled by an obviousness that dampens any suspense, this sensitive, environmentally concerned movie is most successful when steeped in the particularities of its location.

This lovingly made homage to avarice feels strangely limp. Instead of gushing, it trickles.

Approaching weighty themes with a very light touch, Benedikt Erlingsson’s Woman at War is an environmental drama wrapped in whimsical comedy and tied with a bow of midlife soul-searching.

Wrestle isn’t slick or impartial, and doesn’t claim to be, yet the movie has a raw honesty that disdains forced uplift.

Thanks to fine performances and a narrative that doesn’t hang about to admire itself, the movie goes down as easily as a love potion at a coven.

High on music and hot with the thrill of discovery, A Tuba to Cuba swarms with shiny happy people.

Ear-shredding to listen to (the soundtrack, between chunks of a comically portentous score, is mostly thrash metal) and soul-destroying to watch, the movie trembles with tragedy. Yet because almost everyone and everything — dialogue, image, setting — is presented in such broad, symbolic strokes, we feel absolutely nothing.

The movie’s occasional chills do little to obscure the thin plotting, problematic pacing and a central mystery that’s left aggravatingly vague.

There’s scarcely a behavior or line reading in this exasperating relationship drama that doesn’t feel like affectation. Fraudulence might be a plot point, but only the writer and director, Emma Forrest, knows why it has to permeate the entire movie.

Favoring the superficial over the substantive, The Gospel of Eureka keeps skirting opportunities to excavate experience.

Ardent and primal, Daughter of Mine addresses complicated ideas with head-clearing simplicity.

Robert Schwartzman’s direction is blah, his story labored and the supporting characters one-note.

Oppressively mirthless, Outlaws can nevertheless be enjoyed, after a fashion, as a surreal tapestry of macho garbling.

Hearing from these survivors is vitally important. But by smushing together two distinct styles of narrative, The Invisibles risks draining the power from both.

For all its flaws — and they are legion — King of Thieves wraps you in a fuzzy blanket of familiarity.

The movie’s emotional potency is undeniable, its slow crescendo of wounded feelings and shimmering photography leaving unexpected imprints on the eyes and heart.

Anna feels more like a device than a person, a collection of eccentric behaviors (her job involves counting molehills) that support an aesthetic of excessive cuteness.

If you like your torture movies tight, twisty and decently executed, then Pledge is for you.

Some squinting will be required to block out the race and class stereotyping, as well as the puddles of sentiment scattered throughout the highly predictable plot. Yet Jon Hartmere’s script has genuinely funny moments and is blessedly short on crassness.

Corfield is fine in a role that gives her little opportunity to do more than run and fight, but a woman this empowered removes the question mark from her survival — and the tension from the movie.

While Jorgen Johansson’s windswept photography creates a credible sense of isolation (he filmed in part at the Mull of Galloway lighthouse), we sense the ominous rhythms of impending calamity.

While fragments of past, present and who-knows-what events flash past, Cage, bless him, fully commits to the nuttiness.

Neither remotely credible nor more than minimally entertaining, Stacy Cochran’s New York City romance, Write When You Get Work, presents rich folk as gullible idiots and blue-collar crooks as heroes.

In prioritizing Crowhurst’s psychological frailty over his physical challenges (both conveyed more evocatively in the excellent 2007 documentary “Deep Water”), Firth and his director find something quietly touching, even soulful, in the character’s wretchedness. In this somber tragedy, the real demons are never anywhere but right inside that boat.

This beautifully realized movie casts a sensitive, secretive spell.

Erik Molberg Hansen’s relaxed camera movements and fuzzy-soft compositions are quite beautiful, and the performances — including the superb Trine Dyrholm as the baby’s Danish foster mother — are pitch-perfect. Best of all is the magnetic August, whose open, mobile features can slide from plain to lovely with just a shift in the light and whose embrace of the character is a joy to watch.

Rich in information and dense with quiet outrage, Shraysi Tandon’s debut feature, the investigative documentary Invisible Hands, jumps into the murky and shameful world of child trafficking and forced labor.

While the movie is rightfully more interested in lauding her bravery than highlighting her sometimes abrasive personality, these small moments help to humanize a portrait that can at times seem more awestruck than enlightening.

With its achingly slow build and understated performances, The Clovehitch Killer strains to surmount its lack of urgency.

Cam is more successful as an oddly feminist tale of gutsy self-reliance than as a fully developed drama.

Lousy with stereotypes and filthy language, the sordid Pimp wraps 21st-century blaxploitation in a lesbian love story as unconvincing as every other relationship on screen.

Cheerfully derivative yet doggedly entertaining, Number 37 benefits from Dumisa’s slick execution and impressive acting by her small cast.

The upshot is a gentle, gossamer movie that, like its soundtrack, goes down easy and is almost instantly forgotten.

The tone is unabashedly partial, yet the women are such entertaining company it’s hard to mind.

Anchored by Rosamund Pike’s powerhouse lead performance, this restive, raw movie slowly accumulates the heft to render its flaws irrelevant.

With visuals as kinetic as its language, Joseph Kahn’s Bodied is an outrageously smart, shockingly funny satire of P.C. culture whose words gush so quickly you’ll want to see it twice.

Using real experiences shared by the homeless in story workshops, Omotoso — who was also a creator of the South African television series “A Place Called Home” — directs with empathy and without sentimentality.

London Fields, directed by Matthew Cullen and adapted from Martin Amis’s 1989 novel, is, quite simply, horrendous — a trashy, tortured misfire from beginning to end.

Like a photograph slowly developing before our eyes, Shirkers (which was also the title of the original picture) is both mystery and manhunt, a captivating account of shattered friendship and betrayed trust. The skill of the editing (by Tan and two colleagues), though, is key.

Programmatic and groaningly trite, What They Had, the debut feature from Elizabeth Chomko, would be impossible to swallow without its star-studded cast. Even so, it requires all their considerable skills to stop this soapy family drama from sliding into complete banality.

Unfolding in real time, this immediately involving story bends and turns in surprising, sometimes horrifying ways. Enriched by Oskar Skriver’s marvelous sound editing, which takes us from a speeding van to a bloodcurdling crime scene with equal authenticity, the movie smoothly blends police procedural with character study.

This isn’t a wisecracking, tongue-in-cheek picture: Green wants us to believe in his Bogeyman, and Curtis is his ace card. Leaving no room for winks or giggles, she makes Laurie’s long-festering terror the glue that holds the movie together.

Fluidly capturing the trajectory of a ruinous obsession, the writer and director, Sara Colangelo, skillfully fudges the line between mentoring and manipulation, and between nurturing talent and appropriating it. Suffusing each scene with an insinuating, prickly tension, she remains ruthlessly committed to her screw-tightening tone, offering the viewer no comforting moral escape hatch.

Reports of excessively punitive training of female gymnasts surface with some regularity, so in that sense Over the Limit is not unexpected. But the Polish director Marta Prus, brilliantly constructing a very particular look at a sport in which the arch of an eyebrow is as important as that of a spine, remains coolly impassive.

Suffused with a sentimentality that Wilde himself would have deplored, The Happy Prince is narratively mushy and meandering. Yet, beneath the prosthetics, there’s genuine pathos in Mr. Everett’s portrayal of a man bitterly aware that his talents are unreliable armor against the perceived sin of his homosexuality.

While most movies of this type simply peter out, “Instructions” maintains such an unswerving commitment to its dark purpose that its final, gorgeously tenebrous images will leave you wobbly for days.

Trouble makes a whole lot of noise without saying very much. The direction is wooden and the cinematography dull, leaving the solid cast (including Julia Stiles as a daffy clerk and Jim Parrack as her knuckle-dragging boyfriend) to shoulder the weight.

A bit of low-budget Nordic nonsense that only makes you appreciate the visual finesse and rowdy discipline of the History channel’s “Vikings.”

Turning black-white conflict into a laudably complex wash of gray, Mr. Green (inspired in part by a conversation he had with a police officer about the 2014 death of Eric Garner) favors reason over outrage. The political heat rises but the movie stays cool, its smooth, smart climax in keeping with its levelheaded tone.

Despite a somewhat soft middle section, Free Solo is an engaging study of a perfect match between passion and personality.

A movie that, for all its operatic allusions and actorly expertise, feels dismayingly passionless.

Don’t Leave Home is a frustratingly befuddled movie that’s nevertheless fascinating.

Lizzie isn’t perfect — the pacing can flag, and the lovely Kim Dickens, as Lizzie’s older sister, barely registers — but Ms. Sevigny’s intelligence and formidable control keep the melodrama grounded. Her empathy for Borden, whose fragile constitution belies a searing will, is palpable, as is the sense of inescapable peril surrounding the two female leads.

All right, then, let’s rip off the Band-Aid: Destination Wedding is torture. And not just because this would-be romantic comedy is grating, cheap-looking and a mighty drag: it also turns two seasoned, likable actors into characters you’ll want to throttle long before the credits roll.

Wistful but never sentimental, it quietly turns the fortunes of one little store into a comment on the fate of many.

A Whale of a Tale is a rambling blend of complaint, tourism and straw-men arguments. What it’s not is persuasive.

While you don’t require familiarity with the dozen or so earlier titles to enjoy this one, you do require a sense of humor that’s easily triggered and a gag reflex that isn’t.

Fragile yet resilient, We the Animals has an elemental quality that’s hugely endearing, using air and water and the deep, damp earth to fashion a dreamworld where big changes occur in small, sometimes symbolic ways.

Wrapping a political-corruption yarn in a blanket of bullets and blood, the Filipino director and co-writer, Erik Matti, slides visual and textual jokes into the mayhem in ways both sly and blatant.

Mr. Sauvaire’s approach may not be for everyone, but his skill and audacity are invigorating — and, strangely, liberating.

Unlike “Sharknado,” The Meg doesn’t seem to know how dumb it is.

Mr. Tyrnauer surreptitiously hoses away the layers of dirt to reveal the fragility of his subject’s anything-goes hedonism.

By rights, Never Goin’ Back should be a chore to sit through. The jokes are dated, the behavior tasteless and the setups tired. Yet the movie has a ramshackle charm that’s due entirely to its vivacious leads, whose mutual devotion and easy, unlabeled sexuality feels endearingly innocent.

Ms. Dyrholm, photographed frequently in brutally unforgiving close-up, fully captures the faded charisma of the woman whose life reads like a Who’s Who of the New York midcentury art scene.

Swerving from predictable to confounding, dreamy to demented, artful to awkward, this genre-twisting hybrid from Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra links art house and slaughterhouse with unexpected success.

The Captain, Robert Schwentke’s harrowing World War II psychodrama, isn’t what you would call enjoyable, exactly. More accurately, it compels our attention with a remorseless, gripping single-mindedness, presenting Naziism as a communicable disease that smothers conscience, paralyzes resistance and extinguishes all shreds of humanity.

Like a bedtime cup of cocoa, Marc Turtletaub’s Puzzle has a soothing familiarity that quiets the mind and settles the spirit.

Darting from micro to macro and back again, squashing obscene consumption against child beauty pageants and ruinous debt, its structure makes for an unfocused thesis. The through line, though, works, as Ms. Greenfield repeatedly turns her camera on her own family and career choices.

The filmmakers’ emphasis on drama honors the driven personality of their subject, while tracing a fairly conventional glad-rags-to-riches narrative arc.

While Pin Cushion might prove too distressing for some, it’s still peculiarly, undeniably original.