Kristen Yoonsoo Kim

Difficult to describe and confounding to follow, the film is best when you submit to the surreal nature of it; then, you will be open to witnessing one of this year’s most mesmerizing movies unfold. Films of such lo-fi aesthetics rarely feel this major.

Negoescu has adapted a short story by Ion Luca Caragiale from 1901, and the lottery ticket concept is not necessarily novel, but he gives the film fresh zest with droll observations and pitifully endearing characters — all while poking meta fun at the austere Romanian New Wave movement he works within, and works to dismantle.

The film betrays its own less-is-more philosophy and becomes weighed down by exposition — but it’s a tense, thrilling ride nonetheless.

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.

An unfortunate, unfunny mess.

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.

Donny’s Bar Mitzvah — which is littered with chaotic party scenes of horny, dysfunctional attendees — oscillates between offensive and offensively unamusing.

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.

Dupieux pulls off this bizarre procedural in a lean running time while hitting the notes of darkness and drollery just right.

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.

Imagine mumblecore with actual mumbling and no wit, even though those lo-fi auteurs, the Duplass brothers, are executive producers.

Once you’re swept up in Emma and Jude’s romance — it’s not hard, even though the montages veer a little too precious — the skimmed-over science matters little. This is sci-fi rooted more in feelings than fact. Its resonance is similar to “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” though it’s arguably antithetical in plot.

Balmès doesn’t arrive at easy, scathing conclusions about the internet. Instead, he lets the camera journey to unexpected places, leading to a different kind of meditation that strikes with deep emotional resonance.

When a movie that feels this scientifically far-reaching lacks heart, the viewing experience is a dreary, soulless one.

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 quirky Save Yourselves! is not necessarily a genre reinventor but a good example of how much fun you can have on a non-studio budget.

Mehrdad Oskouei’s latest documentary, Sunless Shadows, is a startling, raw confrontation with Iran’s patriarchy.

The film’s fast-paced editing makes it difficult to get to know individual members, but the men register powerfully as a collective, just like a real rowing team.

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.

Though the Psammead grants the children’s wishes . . . they come with a catch: a set up for an unimaginative moral lesson and nearly two hours of lukewarm familial bonding.

Cohen and Shenk amplify the voices of the survivors while recognizing that Nassar’s arrest doesn’t dissipate the pain or deep-rooted exploitation.

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.

The film resonates most deeply during its raw, vulnerable scenes.

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.

With his first feature, the director and co-writer Nico Raineau flips gender stereotypes, giving Darla more sexually aggressive traits and Bailey more timid ones. But even that feels trite.

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 film delicately depicts the hardship of being gay in a Catholic culture and the pressure for machismo in a crime-ridden country.

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.

Light From Light reveals it’s far more interested in human concerns than metaphysical ones.

It’s a shame we never get to know Andrew as well as Regina — arguably part of the moody teen persona — but it’s even more affecting when Andrew’s initially passive existence escalates due to white fear, and his mother is left to fight for his chance at life.

Mid90s, for all its darkness, is uplifted by its hilarious moments and joyous skating shots.

Winstead is wildly funny (and spot-on) doing the impressions in Nina’s act (especially of Björk ordering a smoothie) but also proves uninhibited and candid when Nina doesn’t have jokes to hide behind.

Daniel Adams’s An L.A. Minute makes you suffer through it all and never redeems itself, despite the potentially interesting duo of Gabriel Byrne and Kiersey Clemons as leads. The stars seem out of place with each other and in this movie, with creators who have no idea what they want to say.

By the time the killings start, the film already feels draining, with no characters worth caring about, much less watching.

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.

This movie so badly wants to be a sexy thriller, but it is neither sexy nor thrilling.

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.

While so many recent renditions of the rom-com have tried to upgrade the genre — usually by going the raunchy route — Set It Up feels so purposefully classic and familiar that it plays right into that nostalgic feel-good spot.

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.

There’s no hint of irony in this film (I don’t think it would work if there were); in fact, Jeannette succeeds in its earnestness, adapting its words from Charles Peguy’s works, but countering it with the pure, joyous silliness of its presentation.

Aardvark, the first feature from writer-director Brian Shoaf, is so inane that several times it put this critic into a fugue state. Meandering in message or plot, the film proves to be not just incoherent but excruciatingly boring, quite a feat with a cast that includes Jenny Slate, Jon Hamm, Sheila Vand, and, sure, Zachary Quinto.

Blockers, on the surface, sticks very much to the formula — even the prom setting is very been there, done that. But it’s subversive in these little details, and the resolution is genuinely touching. The best part is that Cannon doesn’t have to sacrifice any of the laughs to get there.

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.

Director Ben Hania has a rhythmic, urgent sense of filmmaking, but she makes the odd creative decision of dividing her film into nine chapters, each a single take.

Keep the Change, despite David’s knack for making offensive jokes, is a charming, sensitive picture that embraces the characters as they are, without mocking them.

Written by Coogler and Joe Robert Cole, Black Panther brings grounded history — in Black History Month, no less — to a fantastical story, carefully considering the world in which the characters reside.

For all the deadpan comedy and eccentric characterization, Kaurismäki anchors the film in Khaled’s story and his immigration anxieties, all depicted with quiet humanity that never feels exaggerated. It’s a beautiful companion piece to Le Havre, and a film that will gently warm your cold, cynical heart.

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.

Motherland opens with a 24-year-old woman already on her fifth pregnancy — just one of many such cases that director Ramona S. Diaz reveals in the vérité-style documentary, which recalls the observational techniques and insights of the films of Frederick Wiseman.

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.

A perfectly enjoyable way to spend 81 minutes.

Not a whole lot happens in The Midwife, but there’s never a dull moment, thanks to the opposing yet equally stellar performances by the two Catherines in the lead.

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.

By focusing on the Sungs, [James] puts real, human faces to this corporation, leaving little doubt they’re the ones to root for.

Hounds may be predictable in plot, but it succeeds in making a psychological web of this troubled threesome.

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

Rupture is a sci-fi abduction thriller that leaves little to be thrilled about.

The biggest show is, naturally, saved for last.... Nothing in all of the Fast & Furious movies has ever felt bigger or more ridiculous — two things F8 rightfully thrives on. It’s exhilarating. Now how will they top this one?

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

It's difficult to label Arnow's cinematic voice, and this particular film, or why anyone would even want to watch something so personal, but i hate myself :) is never not fascinating.

Siff gives a modest but poignant performance that rings true for women of a certain age and career.

The problem — aside from the movie being simple and gimmicky — is in the execution — Schulze's, not the villain's.