Jeannette Catsoulis

Part career profile and part psychological exploration, “Panico” smoothly accomplishes the first but teases gold with the second.

A work of glaring artifice, Miller’s Girl, written and directed by Jade Halley Bartlett, is being touted as a psychological thriller, but it’s too vapid and silly to do much besides titillate.

The direction, by Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya, is sure and unfussy, spinning a warmly humane story of cross-generational connection.

The movie is too juvenile and too timid to acknowledge the real-world chill of its online cabal of murderous social misfits.

A mood board of mashing, slashing, snapping and splintering, this feature, directed by Xavier Gens, is revenge-movie cliché ground down to the studs.

The Inner Cage isn’t exactly a feast for the senses. Even so, if you’re in the mood to listen, the film’s careful conversations occasionally serve up food for thought.

Boutella is a pleasingly game and lithesome heroine, but the movie around her feels curiously indifferent, a crammed, compressed delivery system for its maker’s dorm-room dreams.

Smoothly shaping familiar genre tropes into a brutal study of class warfare and the stifling of pity, the director, Um Tae-hwa (who wrote the script with Lee Shin-ji), makes human kindness the first casualty of social disorder.

Bland photography and perfunctory writing are the very least of my issues with Next Goal Wins, a movie-shaped stain on the class of entertainment known as the sports-underdog comedy.

Pondering the downside of notoriety and our willingness to exchange safety for fame, Dream Scenario is often funny and frequently surreal.

This gently humorous movie operates so smoothly you may not notice its subversiveness.

A misbegotten blend of the futuristic and the antiquated, “Divinity” is an unintentionally comical sci-fi diatribe obsessed with beautiful bodies, bickering brothers and biblical symbolism.

Intellectually rich and cinematically disciplined (brief movie clips, another perfectly aligned Philip Glass score), The Pigeon Tunnel is a cautious, playful portrait of an expert manipulator.

Inspired by Pete Gleeson’s 2016 documentary about two Finnish backpackers, “Hotel Coolgardie,” The Royal Hotel is after something more subtle than pure horror.

Measured against the often mediocre standards of today’s glut of reboots and reimaginings, “Believer” is slickly professional, its young performers more than up to the task. It’s also disappointingly, if unsurprisingly, cautious, gesturing only wanly toward the original’s potent weave of puberty, religion and corporeal abuse.

Screwy and strange, Perpetrator is gleefully unsubtle, but its ensanguinated excess is part of the fun.

Its experimental style, marked by long, dialogue-free stretches, color flares and pristine sound effects, can seem calculated and off-putting, the narrative slight and dramatically slack. Yet the film’s provocations have a playfulness and generosity that are enormously appealing.

Wrapped in drab locations and jaundiced lighting (Chananun Chotrungroj’s photography is brilliantly bleak), this grisly gynecological horror movie is not for the squeamish.

A deeply silly time-travel weepie buoyed solely by the soapy warmth of its performances.

At a time when too many movies feel cautious and constrained, Medusa Deluxe is gloriously uninhibited and gaudily diverting.

The general impression given by this warm, low-key film is that the spying was a simple act of pacifism. Countervailing voices are faint and few; anyone seeking more vigorous pushback will have to look elsewhere.

By choosing simplicity over specifics, the filmmakers free themselves from the weight of words and open up space for a mood of intense disquiet and unusual sensitivity.

As for LaBute, a once incisive chronicler of male cruelty and ineptitude, his continued dabblings in genre are lamentable. Perhaps the kindest thing to do is pretend this dud never happened.

The result is a bleakly hopeless view of human nature that the finale, while cracking the door to a further expansion of the story, fails to refute.

Unfolding with a tonic intelligence and a slow accretion of menace, Alex MacKeith’s screenplay is smoothly in sync with the specific skills of each performer.

Gloomy and vague, Run Rabbit Run is a moody, noncommittal tease replete with the usual spectral signifiers: clammy dreams, scary drawings, unsettling masks. Snook does everything but rend her garments in a performance that only emphasizes the busy vapidity of Hannah Kent’s script.

The misogyny of the movie’s risibly sadistic villains is only one distasteful thread in this sleazy saga of rescue and revenge.

Top-heavy with big names (Tina Fey, Jon Hamm) and set in a nondescript small town populated primarily by sad sacks and losers, the movie struggles to get out of second gear.