Kristen Yoonsoo Kim

It is not without tender or enjoyable moments — that’s the beauty of a formula — but there’s a tonal imbalance of comedy and drama. The two constantly deflate each other.

The film, written by Oberli and Cooky Ziesche, satirizes class divides and xenophobia (“the Pole” constantly carries a derogatory connotation here), but never takes the satire far enough to be memorable, challenging or anything beyond whimsical.

The film stumbles in delivering a cohesive vision.

With only a few fleeting moments of nail-biting thrills, Every Breath You Take remains mostly tepid and frustrating.

Amid the lush greenery of the setting, the atmosphere is perpetually bone-chilling — complete with an ominously high-pitched score — making the film seem distant and difficult to fully embrace

Long Live Rock feels, at best, like a passionate but elementary essay. More often than not, it feels like a table of contents. The hot-topic buttons are touched upon, but McHugh doesn’t forge far enough into the mosh pit.

Keith Thomas’s slim but effective The Vigil milks terror from a minimalistic setup, relying on the shapes we make out with squinted eyes in the shadows.

Zoe Lister-Jones’s The Craft: Legacy, produced by Blumhouse (“Get Out”), is a disappointing distillation of the original that’s mostly devoid of personality.

The script, by Mohler and Brittany Shaw, tends to be overtly formulaic, but the emotional resonance of the two leads carries this movie.

Above all, the music has the greatest staying power — it is the film’s saving grace, just like it is Rose’s during her darkest days.

The documentarian Joseph Hillel tells their stories in somewhat formulaic fashion, creating a perfectly pleasant, educational movie that is not as riveting as it should be.

Tito is a better achievement in sound and visuals than plot or character. The sheer strangeness of the film may be mesmerizing at first, but even the slim 70-minute run time eventually feels tedious when so little happens.

The film, ultimately, still lacks Liberto’s own sense of agency.

For a film granted so much up-close access with its subject, Picture of His Life hears surprisingly little from Nachoum himself. Between vérité clips of the journey, the film is inundated with archival footage.

Fox is riveting as a stubborn go-getter who often employs morally questionable methods for the sake of truth and art. But her screen presence isn’t enough to fill out this lean thriller, which hits so many cliché beats along the way.

The film traces the falling out that led to the women’s current iciness. Their own connections, revealed bit by bit, make their plan even more ludicrous.

Leopold and Persi are both compelling performers, but the writer-director Yuval Hadadi renders their characters with little subtlety.

Even with the personal elements, the lean feature also feels like an educational program, to a fault.

Spanning more than half a century, Tigertail goes back and forth in time, tracing the events that allowed Pin-Jui to achieve his American dream yet made him so aloof to his loved ones. It does this to mixed results.

Despite some moments of tenderness and easy chemistry between Zeke and Mo, “Big Time Adolescence” doesn’t have enough heart or humor to save it from becoming just another movie about white dudes bro-ing out.

Given how nauseating it is to watch Hunter perform increasingly perilous acts of self-harm in her prison of a mansion, neither the payoff nor the psychology behind her actions makes Swallow an illuminating enough addition to the woman-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown genre.

Despite the classic David-versus-Goliath narrative, the story is never as mesmerizing as the grotesquely glam stage numbers and Imperioli’s illuminated face watching them, glowing with pride.

This talking-head footage is a promising start that ultimately leads to a less than illuminating documentary.

The forbidden romance has its will-they-or-won’t-they thrills, but this first feature by the directors Amp Wong and Ji Zhao, becomes a basket of tangled snakes when Blanca faces far too many obstacles.

As promising as Ernie and Joe’s program may seem, there is no insight into whether the nation’s law enforcement agencies are prioritizing these humane methods.

Gutierrez works some twists on the familiar premise, and one standout thrill of a chase scene employs Brian De Palma’s signature split screens. But as it nears the two-hour mark, the film becomes exhausting, shedding very little light on the futuristic implications of the story.

Elijah Bynum’s messy debut film is only bearable thanks to Chalamet’s charisma.

If there’s one thing that Van Sant does very well here, it’s creating a humanizing anchor at the center of the story. Despite some distracting narrative choices and sketchy character development (especially with Mara’s character, who, of course, turns into a love interest), the film does eventually find its footing.

Lewin’s film is directionless, so muddied by Berg’s bloated résumé that the payoff never comes. Berg was an enigmatic and underappreciated Renaissance Man, and we leave the film not especially enlightened.

Howard, who is trans himself, approaches the film with sensitivity, but it ends up feeling like a conversation to be continued, not resolved. At least there’s some classic Claire Danes crying.

I’m still hopeful about Shawkat’s screenwriting career — especially since her performance always feels so genuine, adding substance to an otherwise deflated story. But other than the script’s daring premise, the material doesn’t rise up to the potential she hints at here: a comedy of ingenuity that takes advantage of Shawkat’s fearless frankness.

Netflix’s Kodachrome is good fall-asleep-with-the-TV-on fare, and I mean you should snooze out immediately unless you want to be subjected to a criminally mediocre family drama.

The jump-skip format renders the chemistry between Senna and Adam so incoherent that by the time you watch them have their big first kiss, then break up, then get back together again, it plays less like a real movie and instead one of those memory slideshows your iPhone photo album generates for you.

There are some nicely shot moments throughout, but they feel empty — slow montages that mostly just fill out the film’s thin plot and already slim runtime.

The film may not end on a tragic note, but in attempting a gritty portrayal of Shanté’s little-known private life, Roxanne Roxanne forgets her genius, as so many other people did back in the day.

Elizabeth inspires empathy, but it often feels like we’re being told to feel a certain way by being shown so much rather than being allowed to naturally warm up to her.

An uncharacteristically melodramatic final act...betrays how grounded (and true to real life) the rest of the movie is.

Unfortunately, Clash buckles under the weight of its many characters.

The film fails to sustain the exhilaration of its initial buildup.

The Nile Hilton Incident, despite a stylish, seedy coating, fails to even come close to the canon of greats that have influenced it.

Though it’s not without charming moments, this story of women standing up to the big bad guys is diminished by unimpressive song-and-dance numbers that feel like Michel Legrand throwaways.

Moscow Never Sleeps is ambitious to a fault. While O’Reilly flexes an ability to tie together several narratives, he introduces so many characters that some of their stories must fall by the wayside. It’s a shame, because that muddles the more interesting vignettes.

It’s a well-meaning portrait, with heartfelt moments — especially as Kim recounts childhood hardships — but it’s often muddled, especially in its selection of talking heads.

The beauty of a single-location thriller is how the tension escalates in containment, but Moverman fails to seize that built-in advantage.

Herzog has previously thrived on madness, so the failure here proves even more curious.