Jeannette Catsoulis

This smart but uneven horror movie has little interest in fun.

Their narcissism is repellent yet riveting, and Mr. Côté comes at his subjects with an artful, exploratory obliqueness that’s endearingly curious, as if discovering a whole new species.

Maintaining an unrelentingly gleeful grip on the film’s tone, Mr. Sigurdsson skillfully whips absurdist comedy and chilling tragedy into a froth of surging hostilities.

Even the most ardent fan could find its bluntness uncomfortably timely: In our build-that-wall moment, a story about a government-sponsored plan to cull poor minorities feels less like political satire than current-affairs commentary.

Watching the men as they work, attend 12-step meetings and struggle to repair frayed familial bonds, she unearths moments of raw revelation that quietly highlight our shameful lack of effective help.

Gorgeously photographed by the Brazilian cinematographer Adriano Goldman, Dark River is a raw ballad of doom and damage.

Sad and sweet, and with a rare lyricism, The Cakemaker believes in a love that neither nationality, sexual orientation nor religious belief can deter.

It’s all ridiculously romanticized and self-serving. But the performances are so good (Mr. Greyeyes, in particular, is a miracle of intelligence and dignity) and Michael Eley’s vistas, shimmeringly shot in New Mexico, are so stunning, it feels churlish to resist.

Self-satisfied and too slick by half, Boundaries projects a sheen of artifice that deflects any genuine engagement with the story.

Damsel may feel 20 minutes too long, but it fills them with attitude and cheek. Here, the frontier is not just a crucible of reinvention, but a wilderness that can make you more than a little crazy.

Capped by a truly lovely final shot, The Yellow Birds (the title comes from a particularly cruel Army cadence) is about unseen wounds and wasted lives. The closer we get to these young men, the closer we are to wondering how many more of these stories we can bear to hear.

With its oversimplified emotions and dumbed-down depiction of the creative process, this inoffensive time-filler dissolves in the mouth like vanilla pudding.

What’s left is a strange, sour tale that’s neither origin mystery nor journey of self-discovery, but a vexing gesture toward damage and delusion that never permits us to peek under its broken heroine’s hood.

The lack of chemistry between the two leads is less damaging than Ms. Bennett’s inability to commit to a tone.

Methodical and efficient, the script (by Mr. Young and Adam Frazier) gets some mileage from its generic setting and zombie-infection theme, even if the croaking order is easily predicted.

How to Talk to Girls at Parties is a kitschy, spaced-out oddity. The energy peaks and droops, pogoes and flatlines, with Sandy Powell’s kooky costumes doing much of the visual heavy lifting.

Summer 1993 is movingly understated and beautifully acted.

Subtle and slow and wrenchingly empathetic, The Escape is about gradually realizing that the life you have may not be the one you want.

Bathed in a shadowy beauty and slippery psychological atmosphere, “Beast” soars on Ms. Buckley’s increasingly animalistic performance.

Featuring more twists than a 1960s dance marathon, Terminal is a flashy, hyperstylized bore.

A low-key character study whose gently repetitive rhythms mask an unusually keen sense of nuance and subtlety.

The two leads are sensational, but the movie, drained of its life force and stuffed with confusing plot complications — like a shoehorned-in undercover agent and some mysterious Albanians — never recovers.

Ray Meets Helen has a wistful, whimsical sophistication that has all but disappeared from movies. Filled with imaginative visuals populated by the ghosts of the gone and hopes for the future, the movie is wonderfully, magically humane.

The Cleanse” embarks on an allegorical journey with only the vaguest notion of a destination. As a result, the movie feels frustratingly repetitive — a single joke repeated ad nauseam.

Working from Peter Bognanni’s 2010 novel, the writer and director, Peter Livolsi, has created a painfully quirky tale that’s so contrived you can almost hear the gears of the plot grinding.

Lurching relentlessly from one conflict to another, the movie distills its emotions — and maintains its momentum — in conversations of remarkably controlled intensity.

Whenever the movie tries to say something insightful about racial integration — or education, or any number of issues — it backs off or bogs down. It’s so tonally and ideologically unfocused that its ideas just slip away.

Managing to feel at once painfully slow and bafflingly truncated, this creaky triptych of not-so-scary tales is a tame curiosity of movie nostalgia.

Palely photographed and anchored by a quiet, rather weary performance from Ms. Keener, Little Pink House is a peculiarly enervated affair. The structure is choppy, and there are odd moments of tonal dissonance.

Though voices both welcoming and hostile to women judges are represented, Ms. al-Faqih’s likely Sisyphean battle to reach her position feels insufficiently underlined.

Mr. Shoaf wastes an excellent cast (and one cute aardvark — you knew there’d be one) in a movie of astonishing vacancy.

Truth or Dare is a wearying slog through crushed feelings and mangled bodies.

The director Warwick Thornton constructs a searing indictment of frontier racism as remarkable for its sonic restraint as its visual expansiveness.

In its convincing portrayal of a situation where a rusty nail is as lethal as an unexploded bomb, and the few remaining inhabitants seem — much like the audience — more likely to die of stress than anything else, the movie rocks. You may go in jaded, but you’ll leave elated or I’ll eat my words.

Underwritten and a smidge too long, Caught is marred by an over-excited musical score that browbeats where it should tease. Yet the movie’s bleak and brutal tone works, as does the visitors’ bizarrely unstable behavior.

Elegantly shot on film by Chris Teague, the movie feels unforced and at times shockingly authentic, allowing its emotions to percolate and rise of their own volition.

Watching it demands little effort. Evict your inner cynic and enjoying it should demand even less.

In a movie whose greatest tension comes from wondering whether Chris will violate his parole by drinking a beer, the actors need to be compelling. Easily clearing that bar, Ms. Falco gives Carol a gentle kindness and the emotional intelligence to transform Chris’s ardor into a catalyst.

Magical, subtle, sensitive and touching, I Kill Giants is everything the bombastic “A Wrinkle in Time” is not.

Now and then, brisk restaurant visits and slow strolls through a cemetery (an unnecessary foreshadowing, given the movie’s title) ventilate the film, but Final Portrait (adapted from Lord’s 1965 book, “A Giacometti Portrait”) is pretty thin on drama.

The filmmaking is so striking — and Ms. Al Ferjani so movingly, indefatigably resolute — it’s impossible not to persevere right along with her.

Simultaneously preposterous and dull, Dear Dictator is the kind of movie where music and wardrobe choices — like the mean girls’ stridently visible underwear — substitute for character.

Though the movie’s loose, sampling style can leave regions and varieties poorly differentiated, its real stars are the vintners. Young or old, entrepreneur or family-only producer, all are passionate and poetic about their beloved beverage.

Cruelly amoral and only marginally credible, Flower is nevertheless wildly entertaining and at times even touching.

With frothing energy and unfettered vulgarity, Us and Them lances the boil of working-class grievance and watches as the infection spreads to everyone in its path.

Small and stagy and claustrophobic, Shining Moon is visually rough yet oddly enticing in its experimental awkwardness.

Rigorously structured and glacially paced, this sophomore feature from Andrea Pallaoro (after his 2015 family tragedy, “Medeas”) is a minimalist portrait of brutal isolation and extreme emotional anguish.

An imbecilic misfire.

As tables turn and turn again — nudged along by a wolfish impostor (Ward Horton) and some creative torturing — the movie allows scant time to ponder each new tack.

Handsome cinematography and a highly competent supporting cast — including Michelle Monaghan, Nathan Lane and Alex Karpovsky — can’t save The Vanishing of Sidney Hall, a tortured mystery dripping with pretentiousness.

Its sociopolitical concerns — primarily around indigenous land rights — are muted and muddled by a script that favors manly grunting and moody looks over clarifying dialogue. Riven with racism and sharp bursts of violence, Goldstone nevertheless has a rough, desolate beauty.

Suffused with sorcery and silvery light, November, written and directed by Rainer Sarnet, is a bizarre Estonian love story — a mishmash of folklore, farm animals and scabrous fun — in which beauty and ugliness fight to the death.

The result is a good-looking but overstuffed genre pileup that confuses as often as it compels.

A soggy string of Hallmark moments designed to interrogate the value of the objects we cherish, the movie is front-loaded with major stars and squelching with sentiment.

As popular as this window-fogging franchise has become, its flaccid finale is likely critic proof. But if I can persuade just one of you to bypass its milquetoast masochism and watch the stratospherically superior “9 1/2 Weeks” instead, then I will have done my job.

Impressively photographed and perkily paced, Jason Filiatrault’s story never droops quite as much as its lead character, injecting a welcome poignancy that tempers the cuteness.

Despite the typically elevating presence of Helen Mirren, this super-silly feature (the fifth from the Australian brothers Peter and Michael Spierig) stubbornly resists being classed up.

This blah trudge from cradle to stage will be catnip to his fans and Ambien to everyone else.

Despite [Fanning's] commitment to the role — and the generally fine supporting performances — this timorous tale sidesteps uncomfortable realities in favor of soothing whimsy and preordained uplift.

Mashing limp romance and artless satire into a ludicrously contrived plot, The Clapper lurches from one mirthlessly eccentric scene to another.

Leisurely and deliberate, intelligent and casually cruel, Have a Nice Day is a stone-cold gangster thriller whose violence unfolds in passionless bursts.

Landing lightly on the loneliness of fame and the ravages of aging, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool is a fond farewell to a distinctive talent. Yet I couldn’t help wishing it had spent less time anticipating Grahame’s death and a little more illuminating her life.

Working a low body count and a slow burn, Desolation is a decent short film that’s been unwisely expanded to feature length.

The miracle, though, is that the movie isn’t a diatribe. Its voices...are gentle and persuasive, using the horrific details of the rape and its aftermath as ballast to stabilize a heart-wrenching history of systemic injustice.

Or maybe not: Committing completely to Carl’s wobbly perceptions, the filmmakers mire us in a hackneyed swamp of narrative uncertainty.

Choosing not to delve too deeply into the mind of either man — or to question Mr. Talese’s journalistic ethics and less-than-scrupulous fact-checking — the directors are content to mostly watch as each vies for control of the movie, and his legacy. It’s an entertainingly desperate joust, playing out beneath defiantly unattractive lighting.

With its fastidious framing and angry-tough temperament, Loveless...earns its air of careful foreboding.

This first narrative feature from Gabe Klinger seduces with breathtakingly gorgeous visuals that feel both achingly nostalgic and elegantly modern. These often ravishing aesthetics and stylistic quirks act as soft restraints, keeping us watching despite a near-total absence of story and a thinly disguised attitude of male entitlement.

A twisty, small-town thriller that blooms in the shadows and shies from the light, “Sweet Virginia” marshals a relentlessly threatening mood from dangerous secrets and unpleasant surprises.

The cinematography isn’t the greatest, and the structure is hit or miss, but so what? In a movie this good natured, the heart is everything. The performances are hilarious, but the dancing is no joke.

The director, Joe Lynch, concocts an uneven blend of video game setups and corporate satire.

As she did in her gentler but equally original “Good Dick” in 2008, Ms. Palka carves a black and biting niche between a man and a woman, a space where chaos and psychological unease demand to be reckoned with.

A dreary pileup of hard-luck monologues and run-down locations, Mark Webber’s Flesh and Blood straddles the line between fact and fiction with exhausting earnestness and a fatal dearth of narrative.

Add the magnificent Christine Baranski to the mix and A Bad Moms Christmas, while still a slog of base sight gags and lazy profanity, becomes marginally more bearable. Only marginally, given that this pitiful follow-up to last year’s “Bad Moms” is even less able to distinguish between crass and comedic.

Though not nearly as mindful or meaty as Mr. Miike’s 2011 triumph, 13 Assassins, “Blade” is creatively gory fun.

Opening an aperture into a process so ego-stripping that it feels unseemly to witness, The Work is enlightening yet also punishing.

The director, Marc Forster (who wrote the script with Sean Conway), fashions such a languid, tipsy aesthetic around the seemingly happy marriage of Gina and James (Blake Lively and Jason Clarke) that it’s easy to keep watching.

God’s Own Country weaves a rough magic from Joshua James Richards’s biting cinematography and the story’s slow, unsteady arc from bitter to hopeful.

Ms. Enos is a credibly fraying voyeur, all anxious looks and nervous starts, but “Never Here” is too emotionally antiseptic to engage.

Slow to get moving and dramatically slack, Jungle cares only about Yossi, whose solo suffering and speed-enhanced hallucinations dominate the narrative.

Offering no hint of the backbreaking drudgery and mental strain of their predicament, this gauzy picture (produced by the couple’s son, Jonathan Cavendish, and directed by his friend, the actor Andy Serkis) is a closed loop of rose-tinted memories.

Niftily paced and tight as a chokehold, the script (by the comic-book writer Scott Lobdell) delivers just enough variation to hold our interest.

Erratically paced and with a pitch-black heart, the movie manipulates at every turn.

The men refused to be deterred by institutional rigidity, political apathy or a skeptical scientific community. Their perseverance is cheering, giving the movie a brightly buoyant tone that belies the suffering at its center and renders the sometimes distracting musical score largely unnecessary.

For one thing, the buildup is so grippingly patient that we’re more than halfway through before the titular battleground is reached. And for another, this painstakingly paced thriller displays an intensity of purpose that makes it impossible to dismiss as well-executed trash.

Caught between the harsh demands of a survival story and the emotional beats of a romantic drama, the director, Hany Abu-Assad, grabs hold of neither.

What some may see as an examination of loss and legacy, others will view as a portrait of psychological coercion: overbearing men riding roughshod over the wishes of a grieving woman.

The accumulation of spot-on performances and long-familiar faces, small-town routines and dusty-worn locations, finally coalesces into a picture that’s greater than the sum of its oft-clichéd parts.

Though disappointment and loneliness guide its conversations, the movie isn’t bleak; it’s a touching and tender commentary on the need to be seen and the desire to be heard.

With a likable cast and a wholesome message about the true meaning of success, The Tiger Hunter might balk at the harsher details of immigrant life, but it has a generosity of spirit that lifts everyone up.

Unlike their spring 2018 fashion collection, Kate and Laura Mulleavy’s first foray into moviemaking, “Woodshock,” is depressingly dull and terminally inarticulate.

In a movie as happy to resurrect characters as rub them out, nothing is of consequence, and the glibness grows numbing.

The soullessness of the enterprise is staggering. Making clichéd, cynical gestures toward romance, Mr. Harris (whose last feature was almost a decade ago) tortured me for a full 96 minutes.

Equal parts disturbing and humorous, informative and bizarre, Rat Film is a brilliantly imaginative and formally experimental essay on how Baltimore has dealt with its rat problem and manipulated its black population.

The performances of the young actors who play them (actual twins, though not conjoined) are the real miracles here, each one creating a distinct personality.

A hodgepodge of pseudoscientific twaddle and variously shifty murder suspects, Rememory satisfies neither as science fiction nor as psychological drama.

Marrying fact and fiction, Jane Goldman’s seamy screenplay is wildly overstuffed; but the director, Juan Carlos Medina, gives the music hall scenes a rowdy authenticity.

The intimacy of the film’s images and the surprising candor of its participants are disarming: Whatever your initial response, be prepared to re-evaluate.

Like the teenage girls who monopolize its attention, Kill Me Please is moody, lovely, preening and libidinous.

A movie that has neither a coherent point nor an authentic character.

With its bleak, yearning tone and defiantly cloudy color palette, “England Is Mine” has a pleasingly granular feel for its era and location. But its imagining of Morrissey as a self-pitying narcissist, a curiously passive intellectual who can’t get out of his own way, soaks the movie in a wearying inertia.

Perhaps stifled by the cultural and commercial clout of its source material (a multimedia juggernaut of books, movies, television shows and a stage musical), Death Note feels rushed and constricted.

Sometimes dreamy but mostly dissatisfying, “Walk With Me” offers no clarity for the curious. We can enjoy the meditative mood, but understanding its underpinnings would require more than this idyll of silence and stillness provides.

“Sidemen” is about more than just legacy. Blessed with extensive interviews with their buoyant subjects (all three of whom died in 2011 within months of one another), Mr. Rosenbaum and his producer Jasin Cadic shape a narrative of professional insecurity and personal resilience.

This quirky, obsessive documentary is about so much more than broken keys and busted type wheels. It’s really about how we create art.

Allan Loeb’s script is glib and grating.

Though the spaces between the funny voices are filled with verdant hillsides and vanilla beaches that stretch the length of the frame, there’s an occasional sour edge to the comedic sparring.

As with last year’s “Lights Out,” [Sandberg] proves a master of the flash-scare, a nifty choreographer of precipitous timing and striptease visuals. But he’s also adroit with more leisurely horrors.

The songs are unmemorable and the choreography less than twinkle-toed, but the lyrics are a delight.

The splatter is deployed cautiously and sometimes wittily, the story moving briskly from wishes granted to costs exacted with the help of familiar faces (including a warm Sherilyn Fenn as Clare’s surrogate mother) and a sympathetic lead.

The Little Hours is saved from ignominy by two brief standout performances.

With a little more shading and originality, 13 Minutes might have pushed beyond its familiar Nazi tropes to shape something more immediate and infinitely more potent: an ominous portrait of radicalization.

The look is rough, the emotions always hovering near the surface. Yet, buoyed by Mr. Sharif’s cheery personality, these can sometimes be defiantly upbeat.

Its arguments range wide without going deep, but its factoids about the medical benefits of hanging out in a forest — and the cognitive costs of a noisy school or hospital — are fascinating and persuasive.

This chilly tale of violent secrets and unvoiced misery relies heavily on the skill of actors who seem to know that one false move could tip the whole enterprise into comedy.

In the lulls between bouts of yammering, however, the director, Johannes Roberts, concentrates on building a solid atmosphere of desperation.

The plot, unlike its execution, is not terrible.

This film belongs to its star.

This first feature from Ari Issler and Ben Snyder (who both wrote the script with Mr. Almanzar, a military veteran) refuses to revel in violence.

The result is a movie about large setbacks and small triumphs, and the grit that takes you from one to the other.

Tobias Lindholm’s screenplay sacrifices credibility for quirkiness.

Impressively lean and rigidly controlled, “The Survivalist” achieves, at times, the primitive allure of a silent movie.

Gone is the original’s joyful sense of mischief; what’s left is an inoffensive piece of twaddle that never fully appreciates the ineluctable bond between community spirit and a drop of the hard stuff.

The vein-popping mood is ultimately more exhausting than exciting.

By the time the final meal is devoured, you’ll be wanting nothing so much as an antacid.

An ultra-low-budget ghost story with an off-kilter sensibility that initially intrigues but ultimately fizzles.

Despite frequent flashbacks and Bobby Bukowski’s richly dimensional photography, the movie has a static, stagy look that amplifies the oppressiveness of its increasingly unpleasant exchanges.

Falling with a thud between two stools, it has neither the zip nor the zaniness of farce nor the airy vivacity of the best romantic comedies.

Buster’s Mal Heart is about the making of a madman. It also aspires, with less success, to philosophically query the void at the center of modern life and Christianity’s failure to fill it.

The movie dives into the black arts with methodical restraint and escalating unease.

Dreary, derivative and flat-out dopey, this dragged-out torture tale will disappoint even those whose hearts race whenever they see a female character strapped to a bed.

Teeming with acts both heroic and reprehensible, John Ridley’s wrenchingly humane documentary, Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992, reveals the Los Angeles riots as the almost inevitable culmination of a decade of heightening racial tensions.

Weighed down by the worthiness of its intentions, The Promise is a big, barren wartime romance that approaches the Armenian genocide with too much calculation and not nearly enough heat.

At best ambiguous and at worst unfathomable, Mimosas, the sophomore feature from the Spanish director Oliver Laxe, merges harsh reality and offbeat mysticism into a reflection on the tug between our higher powers and baser instincts.

The performances are desultory, the musical score bullying and the drama — aside from the game-changing placement of inconvenient shrubbery — as predictable as Tom senior’s steadily sprouting beard.

It’s all just empty calories; what this movie desperately needs is conflict.

The script is incapable of penetrating the moral thicket that the actors and the cinematographer, Zachary Galler, have so carefully woven.

It takes an especially robust sense of self to so openly invite ridicule, rendering the film’s title somewhat less than credible.

More psychodrama than postapocalyptic adventure, the movie parcels out its scares in small, effective jolts, delivering just enough menace to remind us of the stakes.

The movie is so perfectly acted and gorgeously filmed (the cinematographer is Julie Kirkwood) that we don’t mind its coyness; the twanging notes of trepidation make us almost grateful for the leisurely build.

All This Panic can feel glancing, its more painful revelations sliding in unheralded and slipping away just as quietly. What’s left is a dreamy diary of a time that passes so quickly yet impacts so profoundly.

Borderline incoherent and unrepentantly lewd, this buddy-cop comedy (based on the 1977-83 television series of the same name) substitutes cars, ’copters and motorcycles for actual characters

Prevenge is a brilliantly conceived meditation on prepartum anxiety and extreme grief.

Touching on issues of artistic survival and the porous boundary between work and pleasure, Ms. Subrin, an accomplished visual artist and filmmaker, sifts addiction, celebrity and the plight of the aging actress into something rarefied yet real.

Playing with memory — the characters’ and our own — allows Mr. Boyle and his cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle, to conjure some of the movie’s loveliest, most melancholy images.

To enjoy The Devil’s Candy, then, one must tolerate slapdash writing (by the director, Sean Byrne) and profoundly irritating adult behavior. Yet Mr. Byrne...somehow whips his ingredients into an improbably taut man-versus-Satan showdown.

Raw, Julia Ducournau’s jangly opera of sexual and dietary awakening, is an exceptionally classy-looking movie about deeply horrifying behavior.

My Scientology Movie relies on a shaggy, meandering charm. At times it plays like an extended skit on “The Daily Show”; yet its disorder also makes its insights — like how strongly the church’s training sessions resemble acting classes — feel refreshingly organic.

Guided by the work of a handful of burr-like journalists, this dense and disturbing documentary dives into the regulatory quagmire of California water rights with more courage than hope.

Table 19 is so awkwardly structured and tonally off-kilter that its moments of catharsis feel wholly unearned.

The two leads are mesmerizing, hurling themselves into their physically demented roles with ferocious commitment.

Bitter Harvest feels awkward and parochial.

It’s a sometimes rocky road cinematically, slipping from enchanting to trite, magical to indulgent with some regularity.

The setup is commonplace, but the scenery is delicious, the dialogue refreshingly tart and the keen supporting cast frisky or affecting, as the occasion demands.

Without these balancing voices, I Am Jane Doe coalesces into a steamroller of pain that squashes our ability to see beyond its wounded families.

The plot matters only inasmuch as it allows the returning director, Chad Stahelski, to stage his spectacular fight sequences in various stunning Roman locations, where they unfold with an almost erotic brutality.

Subtly rebellious and defiantly optimistic, “Speed Sisters” masks the sound of gunshots with the roar of revving engines. For these women, driving symbolizes a freedom they can otherwise only imagine.

A horror movie of such ineptitude that it invites sympathy for even its least gifted participants.

A depressing slog that could have been so much more.

The gently nostalgic mood and sleepy pacing effectively erase the movie’s necessary edge.

The characters don’t have conversations so much as helpfully recite their back stories, and the long-buried secret is soon so obvious that the movie’s last-act hysteria feels forced and a little ridiculous.

Light on plot yet heavy on chemistry, Paris 05:59 is at times a little precious. But the two leads are so believably besotted that their occasional immaturity doesn’t rankle.

While intellectually laudable, Mr. Kelly’s determined objectivity is so distancing that it takes an inherently intriguing story (based on a 2011 article in The New York Times Magazine) and sucks the life out of it.

Bathed in a funk of testosterone, and heaving with homophobia and misogyny, My Father Die is a trashy jewel.

Though thematically vague, thinly plotted and without a reliably sympathetic soul to cling to, the movie has a mutinous energy and an absurd, knockabout charm.

Characters are simply triggers for the overwrought action sequences, though between the Edward Scissorhands editing and occasional wobbling background, even those are less than distinct.

Alternately sexy and silly, galvanic and gentle, MA is best enjoyed as a slide show of visual blessings and, sometimes, bafflements.

Adapted from Hans Fallada’s 1947 novel (and based on a true story), Alone in Berlin is dour and flavorless.

Stingingly attuned to the tension between long-term love and last-minute misgivings, Between Us makes a familiar situation feel remarkably fresh.

Despite solid acting (including John Cusack as a plainclothes detective), Arsenal is hobbled mainly by its director’s histrionic tendencies.

Embracing a structure that implicitly acknowledges the complexity of the issue, Ms. Marson nevertheless contributes to the film’s general fuzziness by failing to clarify the legal and moral guidelines that govern these kinds of prescriptions.

Why Him? is trite, crass and insultingly moronic.

Gruesome without being gory, The Autopsy of Jane Doe achieves real scares with a minimum of special effects.

Staggeringly silly and visually disordered.

The combined skills of the director, Gonzalo López-Gallego, and his cinematographer, José David Montero, can’t surmount a story that gives us no one to invest in.

This nostalgic nod to the Chinese magic-and-martial arts genre known as wuxia mixes love story and clan war with equal amounts of silliness and heart.

Unfolding with a minimum of dialogue, Francisca’s maturation from watcher to doer would be laughable if performed with less nuance or photographed with less originality.

The pace is patient, the acting solid and the special effects emphasize craft over flash as the characters rejigger our perceptions from one scene to the next.

The movie’s cinematographers may hog the limelight, but it’s the sweat of the sound engineers that brings their work to life.

[An] insipid and uninformative portrait of singularity and obsession.

This amiable look at life on the margins gradually accumulates a melancholy that punctures the drollness.

In this achingly inept thriller, you will see Naomi Watts do what she can to sell a plot of such preposterousness that the derisory laughter around me began barely 20 minutes in.

[An] elegantly unsettling documentary.

Much of this is funny and even perceptive about the nooks and crannies of adult sexual relationships. It’s also very well acted.... But something feels off.

Ms. Story’s unconventional approach provokes responses that a traditional facts-and-figures discussion might not. Yet the film’s formal abstraction, far from creating emotional distance, is unexpectedly moving.

Cramming fantasy and mysticism, faith and history into a single riverboat journey, this dirgelike meditation on China’s painful economic rebirth dispenses with narrative in favor of semiotics.

The Whole Truth plays like an especially claustrophobic courtroom procedural, drably photographed and generically framed.

Mr. West retains his signature restraint and slow-burn approach to brutality. Missing, however, is his typically skillful manipulation of tension, partly because his tone veers so often from jokey to reverential, from winking at the western to making a sacrament of it.

Awash in blood and revoltingly misogynistic dialogue, this latest redneck ruckus (his seventh feature) is a grindhouse slog of unrelenting bad taste.

Narrated, rather annoyingly, by the Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds, Huntwatch feels dismayingly one-sided. Yet as we hear of animals being skinned alive and see a bludgeoned pup linger in agony, any pro-hunt argument seems emphatically beside the point.

A strange, spiky movie that refuses to beg for our affection, Little Sister, the fifth feature from Zach Clark, molds the classic homecoming drama into a quirky reconciliation between faith and family.

Dependably genuine, and suffused with Mr. Jaglom’s increasingly mellow intelligence, this lighthearted backstage drama will feel to his fans like a gathering of familiars.

An awkward merger of wide-eyed innocence and political unrest, Derrick Borte’s sweet, almost sugary picture wants to rock but never finds the gumption.

The directors, Brian McGinn and Rod Blackhurst, have produced a tightly edited, coherently structured and ultimately moving reassessment that burrows beneath the lurid in search of the illuminating.

There’s a headlong temerity to Mr. Johnson’s style that places the dippy thrill of moviemaking front and center, revealing a director (and a character) so high on his power to misrepresent reality that a future in politics seems all but assured.

The artifice of the form works something wondrous with the material, highlighting the generic nature of our response to extreme violence.

Though rife with implausibilities, Transpecos is fortified by strong acting and a location whose desolate beauty is a gift to Jeffrey Waldron’s serene camera.

The writer and director, Daniel Noah, creates no space for the story’s darker corners, or for his star to delve beneath the surface of Max’s depression and anger. Then again, who cares? It’s Jerry Lewis, so everyone can just shut up.

Dipping no more than a toenail in the philosophical waters surrounding personhood, the movie is at once ideologically vague and maddeningly self-serious.

Unlovely and uninvolving, Level Up is a running-man cocktail of brutality spiked with low-level humor.

Mr. Van Sant has always had a sentimental streak — reaching some kind of apogee with “Restless,” in 2011 — but a better script might have replaced literalness with the emotional intelligence that the film badly needs.

More than a fable about the clash of tradition and modernity, Ixcanul is finally a painful illustration of the ease with which those who have can prey on those who don’t.

This spinoff from the story of a magical kingdom besieged by an evil empire is too ludicrous for words.

The movie’s ability to express, with directness and humor, the insecurities of intimacy — most remarkably during the couple’s first night together — is a delight.

Furnished with faces as beaten as the vehicles the brothers drive and discard, Hell or High Water is a chase movie disguised as a western. Its humor is as dry as prairie dust...and its morals are steadfastly gray.

Though too slight to be memorable, the gay romance Front Cover takes a gentle, thoughtful look at the intersection of ethnicity and sexuality.

Such an uncommon artist warrants a less conventional survey than this one.

When [Ms. Jones] bounds onstage with a holler and a howl — and diction that nails every last word to the melody — it’s clear she deserves that exclamation point in the title. Even if the movie around her sometimes struggles to do the same.

For all its hints at imminent catastrophe, Nerve feels surprisingly tame.

Often chaotic but never disorienting, the movie’s spirited set pieces — like a wriggling ribbon of undead clinging doggedly to the last compartment — owe much to Lee Hyung-deok’s wonderfully agile cinematography.

Spackling over any copycat cracks with strong acting and fleet editing, Lights Out delivers minimalist frights in old-school ways.

By restricting himself to showing how well Mr. Robbins does his job, Mr. Berlinger mainly reveals how narrowly he has done his own.

Slow and sincere, The Debt bites off more plot than it can dramatically chew, its characters — especially the go-between played by the excellent Argentine actor Alberto Ammann — diluted by political maneuvering.

Dated, despondent and pretty much a disaster, Cell plays like a series of nods to other science fiction-horror hybrids, notably “The Matrix” (1999) and Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

Belaboring the cartoon connection, the director leaves the family struggles that enrich Mr. Suskind’s 2014 book of the same title stubbornly veiled.

What’s troubling is the film’s slow and steady exposure of a music business machine that gobbles up individuality and spits out a sellable package.

Unfolding with a reticence that’s occasionally confusing, Les Cowboys presents a suggestive, almost abstract take on terror and the generational toxicity of bigotry.

Impossible to categorize, this stunningly original mix of the macabre and the magical combines comedy, tragedy, fantasy and love story into an utterly singular package that’s beholden to no rules but its own.

An odd-couple caper of staggering dopeyness that makes you long for the snap and sizzle of the buddy movies of the 1980s.

Seoul Searching is rude, funny, silly and poignant. Above all, it’s kind; Mr. Lee understands that belonging is a feeling that many of us may never experience.

Everything is supersized and preposterous, but Mr. Chu, with two films in the “Step Up” franchise under his belt, is undaunted by crowds and confusion.

Even if you don’t recognize the majority of the unidentified clips assembled here, or the quotations that divide and guide them, the fascination they exert is all their own.

Thanks to Ms. Haas’s truly remarkable lead performance (she was 16 at the time of filming) and Ms. Shalom-Ezer’s nuanced dialogue, Adar’s journey finally feels more like one of empowerment than victimization.

Our hero’s quest, however — updated to the 1980s, when the country’s corporations enjoyed unprecedented government benefits — never ignites, mostly because of Mr. Lee’s acting deficits.

Proudly crass and amiably dumb, Nicholas Stoller’s gag-crammed sequel essentially takes the bones of the 2014 original and gives them a gender flip.

What We Become is a very pretty movie with a very dark heart. The payoff is brutal, but earned.

Dark Horse is a canny package that uses the classic structure of the sports-underdog story to deliver a glowing ode to community pride and the merits of collective action over individual gain.

Viewers...are unlikely to be more than marginally amused by its fair-to-middling acting, enervated plot and forcibly diverse group of drifting souls gathered on the fictional Greek island of Khronos.

Strip away the smatterings of sex and globs of gore, and children would really get a kick out of Tale of Tales, Matteo Garrone’s colorful and kinky exploration of what women want. And what men will do to give it to them.

Spouting stiltedly clichéd dialogue...the actors struggle to sell their characters. Only Mr. Harris eventually succeeds, conveying, in a single speech, what it must be like to be the parent of an addict.

The dialogue may be dire, but the dancing is delightful.

This sad slasher is as lacking in scares as in ideas.

The comedy is forced, the drama nonexistent and the actors melt into a yapping clan that seems to go everywhere en masse — a gesticulating blob of upraised shoulders and upturned palms.

Digging into the psychological space between her wildly public life and intensely private death, Everything Is Copy is a pickle slathered in whipped cream. Just like its subject.

A story that kicked off two years ago at a reasonable gallop has now slowed to barely a limp.

Concocted with heaps of style but only a smattering of substance, Benjamin Dickinson’s sophomore feature, Creative Control, is as brittle and unwelcoming as its characters’ surroundings.

Sneakily tweaking our fears of terrorism, 10 Cloverfield Lane, though no more than a kissing cousin to its namesake, is smartly chilling and finally spectacular.

Johanna Schwartz’s miraculously hopeful documentary, They Will Have to Kill Us First: Malian Music in Exile, delivers a vibrant testimony of resilience under oppression.

Though at times pleasingly quirky, the story is too slackly written and insipidly photographed to entertain.

If you drink every time you’re reminded of Monty Python’s 1979 Judean jaunt, “Life of Brian,” you might just make it through to the end.

Directed by Ross Katz and filmed like an ad for erectile-dysfunction medication, The Choice is almost repellently synthetic.

Shatteringly stupid and repulsively misogynistic, Martyrs mashes revenge, torture and the supernatural into one solid, quasi-religious lump.

Ms. Riesgraf, who at times recalls the young Teri Garr, is gutsy and committed, but not even Meryl Streep could make this hokum credible.

Defiantly amateurish yet never less than engaging, “Sweaty Betty” is a true oddity.

Other People’s Children desperately wants to take a deep dive into a young woman’s pain and the solace of artistic expression. For that to happen, though, would require much better actors and a much smarter script.

Rhythmically blending vintage recordings and live performances, The Winding Stream exudes a quirky warmth that counters its PBS-pledge-drive aura.

Captured more for poetry than for clarity, the topography of penalties and free kicks can be impossible to follow. But Léo Bittencourt’s photography has flash and flair, and hardscrabble determination on a real-life field of dreams has a narrative all its own.

As drifting and dreamy as its searching heroine, My Friend Victoria takes a graceful but unsatisfying stroll through the life and longings of a young black woman in contemporary Paris.

Curating a selection of the original interview recordings (whose sound quality is damn near pristine), Mr. Jones fashions an unfaltering encomium that’s entirely free of the highfalutin monologues that might deter noncinephiles.

Sensible and unnerving, Stink! is likely to incite, at the least, a purging of Axe body spray from adolescent boys’ bedrooms.

It’s all very heady and voluptuous, but it’s also painfully superficial.

The audience, given not an ounce of human warmth nor one person to care about, finally has no choice but to cheer for the anonymous cyberbully who wants them all dead.

Mr. Alverson jacks up the tension with exquisite restraint.

Battling a preposterous plot and second-tier performances that are, at best, serviceable, this roll-along thriller from Scott Mann works its keister off to turn beef jerky into chateaubriand.

This devastatingly raw documentary shows that for some the fighting may stop, but the suffering continues.

Mr. Hardy, however, would rather busy himself with reminders of earlier creature features.... Luckily, John Nolan’s old-school effects are wicked good, and Martijn van Broekhuizen’s mossy photography is pleasingly sinister.

As if all its artistic energy had been gobbled up by the fornication, Love has nothing left with which to build its characters or set them in motion.

Harnessing a range of appropriately spooky-oddball narrators and striking visual styles — including graphic novels, early photography and Expressionist painting — the Spanish director and animator Raul Garcia simultaneously honors and reimagines.

Sarah Silverman burns through the indie drama “I Smile Back” without making the slightest move to gain our sympathy.

Mr. Russell is far from the only reason to see this unexpected low-budget treat, a witty fusion of western, horror and comedy that gallops to its own beat. That rhythm is dictated entirely by the writer and director, S. Craig Zahler, a novelist and musician who flips genre conventions upside-down and cares more about character than body count.

The story’s seemingly clear notions of guilt on one side and grievance on the other are gradually nudged in unexpected directions.

The rambling, uncertain tone engendered by Ms. Sichel’s striving to align her Buddhist beliefs with the harsh realities of terminal illness also weakens her story’s gravitational pull.

Moving, humane and unfailingly polite, This Changes Everything presents a Panglossian view of approaching disaster that (according to the film’s publicity notes) seeks to empower rather than to scare. But we should be scared.

Funny and feisty, gritty and sometimes grim, this first feature from the photographer Elaine Constantine delivers a sweaty snapshot of a very specific time and place.

Dan Kay’s filament-thin story, accessorized with flapping vultures and disturbing graffiti, relies entirely on Mr. Cage’s desperate-dad energy.

Revealing its humanity slowly and a little tardily, Finders Keepers finally does justice to its dueling antiheroes.

It’s the film’s sounds that really wrench. If you’ve ever wondered what a breaking heart sounds like, it’s right here in the futile warble of the last male of a species of songbird, singing for a mate that will never come.

Unspooling with virtually no music and a seriously unsettling sound design, Goodnight Mommy gains significant traction from small moments.

Maintaining a strict formal allegiance to reserve and restraint, [Mr. Zobel] shapes a dreamily elegant emotional ballet from glances and gestures and subtle shifts in power.

Drifting and sweet, 7 Chinese Brothers (like Mr. Byington’s gentle 2009 love story, “Harmony and Me”) leaves a melancholy but hopeful aftertaste.

There’s barely a whiz-bang punch line or smoothly executed setup to be found in a movie that longs to be a sparkling bedroom comedy and winds up a tortured, fizz-free farce.

Dumb as dirt and just as generic, Hitman: Agent 47 trades brains for bullets and characters for windup toys.