Lisa Kennedy

So many details in this comedy-drama (a characterization worth quibbling with) are meant to provoke. And Our Hero, Balthazar teases with the promise of a darkly intelligent film. Not unlike its protagonist’s tears, the effect is dismayingly performative.

Ventimiglia becomes the sequel’s saving grace.

The directing brothers Charles and Daniel Kinnane have worked with James before (“Home Team”) and know what they have in the ridiculously amiable star. They also know there’s more, if not depth, soulfulness to his talents. In the place of pratfalls, they’ve found a kind of sheepish charm and hurt.

Cumberbatch gives himself fully to the task of abjection, plunging us into the shadows and chaos of Dad’s life. But the movie neglects to make Mum’s presence palpable — and that is a loss.

A body isn’t the only thing that goes overboard here.

It has its moments — Nicole and Roger on the steps of her brownstone, for one. And it’s awfully lovely to look at (cinematography by Martim Vian). But, like its characters, it’s a little too comfortable with being betwixt and between.

Finally Dawn is at its most intriguing as Costanzo entrusts his curly haired, wide-eyed naïf to maneuver the looking glass of Italian versus Hollywood cinema. Hint: Italy comes off more soulful.

Brick is built almost entirely of hints and twists.

What’s not convincingly nailed by the film’s moody bravado is the grief propelling its flirtatious and fraught quartet toward presumptive tragedy.

With playful visual flourishes, a willfully garish palette and winks galore (including one to the French feminist writer Monique Wittig), Langlois’s debut has stylistic ambition for days. But it’s not as genre-fluent as “Love Lies Bleeding” and “I Saw the TV Glow,” or as swoon inducing as its volatile couple deserves.

For all the potentially crushing challenges Pia faces — losing her business, not living out her dream of being a photographer, alienating her beloved younger sister — Picture This, keeps it light, never letting the sharp edges of potential failure come into focus.

No genre gesture goes untapped in the deliberately hagiographic “Mary,” a coming-of-age saga about the mother of Jesus. Directed by D.J. Caruso and written by Timothy Michael Hayes, the film aims to draw multitudes.

“Lost on a Mountain” never fully achieves its complicated halcyon aims.

The writer-director Stelana Kliris is undaunted by, though not entirely in control of, balancing her material’s at times somber, at other times blithe, notes.

One gets the sense that the director, in not wanting to rob the adult Edgardo (Leonardo Maltese) of his agency, even if it was woefully compromised, resorts to a horror-inflected score and overdramatic scenes of parental anguish to make clear the devastating consequences of a child separated from his family. The heightened drama seems hardly necessary.

For every inventive or simply satisfying rom-com, there are dozens of clumsy, rote ones — French Girl falls among the latter.

Rowland commits to the thankless task of playing a smart woman gone stupid. Rhodes can’t do much with Zyair, whose affect is more flat than seductive.

An amiable ensemble effort, with two sturdy lead performances, Suncoast is reminiscent of the minor-key, quirky-charming ’90s dramedies so often discovered by the Sundance Film Festival. This is a fine thing; there are deserved laughs and tears. It is also a slightly awkward thing.

Which Brings Me to You is cleverly structured but often feels too crowded with the ghosts of lovers past.

As eloquent as it is, This Much We Know may also be exploitative.

Another Body is most persuasive when experts weigh in on the reality-upending aspects of deepfake technology and image-based sex abuse.

The movie sticks to the shallow end.

The Inventor is rife with somewhat didactic lessons — about power, innovation, curiosity — yet a presumably unintended one might be that lessons themselves, however insightful, are not always captivating.

The filmmakers go for too-easy laughs; the movie doesn’t seem to trust its audience to sit with the pain, much less to find the achy humor in it, as a more assured film might. The actors here are good, but they are not miracle workers.

It’s a good thing that Jagannathan and Brown have training in the theater: They imbue Priya and Nic’s densely verbal jousts, dodges and truths with compelling chiaroscuro hues.

Longoria, working from a screenplay by Lewis Colick and Linda Yvette Chávez, sprinkles lessons in self-esteem throughout. (The movie is Longoria’s feature directing debut.) And the women here — including Montañez’s mother and Judy — are more than run-of-the-mill catalysts. Still, should it come as a surprise that a movie this puffed up has a dusting of flavors that might not be real?

With access to behind-the-scenes processes, the documentary can be instructive about the work of changing legacy institutions, but also wincingly cautionary as Wolfs, his administrators and curators get tangled up in numbers and nomenclature.

Apart from some deadpan exchanges between the Mother and Zoe, Lopez plays the role fierce. Even so, it isn’t always clear which gestures in the film should be taken seriously, and which make sport of the genre’s masculine posturing while offering an allegory about a birth mother’s sacrifice.

That this movie — directed by the Canadian filmmaker Stephen Williams and written by Stefani Robinson — leans too mightily on romance to the detriment of exploring more fully his genius feels like a missed opportunity.

With filial care but a flawed script, the filmmaker delves into what drove Bogart, the man, more than Bogart, the artis.

While there’s much to admire here, there are stylistic choices that vex. The First Step stumbles as it tries to balance its interest in Jones with the significance of the bill.

In his feature debut, the director Mo McRae displays a nice way with actors and a gift for visual tension, but in aiming for absurdist humor, he lands on something more vexing. It’s the script — by McRae and Sarah Kelly Kaplan — that’s the problem.

The Drop is smarter than it is funny. As sympathetic as Konkle and Fowler are as the beset couple, had the film leaned into its intelligence more, trusting its bleak comedy and affording its other characters a little emotional wiggle room, it may have achieved a more perfect coupling of each.

This update has its moments of aplomb, but too many of Dickens’s most incisive lines are no more, which invites the not entirely charitable, two-word retort Scrooge made famous.

It would all be pretty boilerplate, but Mann’s anchoring appeal — his lean into Griffin’s modesty and decency — saves the movie from a sorrier fate.

What happens once the film vilifies the animal rights contingent, however, is an example of how movies can protect their heroes and create their scapegoats (pardon the expression) to the detriment of dramatic complexity.

Learn to Swim is lovely to behold, but the sullen artist at the center feels too often like he’s drowning in melancholia and might take us down with him.

Directed with some unexpected beats by Katie Aselton, the comedy captures a bit of the esprit de girlfriends of HBO’s “Insecure,” but borrows too giddily from the Nancy Meyers rom-com catalog of upscale homes.

Instead of character and chemistry, the film employs a series of running gags meant to support the star’s likability and not compete with his wisecracks.

Short on homers but not humility, The Royal won’t vie with any sports flicks for flash, but it doesn’t steep its worthwhile lessons in sanctimony either.

For those viewers aged out of the movie’s intended demographic, that quandary isn’t as compelling as the evidence of its lead actors’ talents, as well as that of the nimble actors who play their besties, Stella (Ayo Edebiri) and Scotty (Nico Hiraga).

“Civil” yields fewer insights than hoped. At times, the neat documentary feels nearly as tailored as Crump’s suits.

It’s Charlie’s wife, Ann (Safiya Fredericks), who provides the movie’s voice-over. Her account has a mythmaking undercurrent but is also the film’s deft way of celebrating Black love and family.

The film’s insights about racism come as familiar baby steps.

In the end, Charlotte is bereft of the spirit of the artist who made the uncanny “Life? or Theatre?” What an even better tribute the movie would have been had it also taken heated energy from Salomon’s art.

How parents mourn a child’s death together — or apart — is among life’s aching mysteries. The director John Hay plumbs the poignancy well but avoids any tussling with Dahl’s legacy, tarnished by antisemitic statements.

As inspiring as his chosen subject is, the director missed an opportunity to use the story to deepen our understanding of our own memories, trauma and forgiveness.

For all its ache and churning emotions, “Butter” winds up being little more than a meager “Afterschool Special.”

Denzel Washington directs this adaptation (the screenplay is by Virgil Williams) with care, respect and a deep-seated knowledge of the Black love stories that don’t make it to the big screen nearly enough.

Likeable stars with little frisson, Elwes and Shields are also saddled with a formulaic script.

Britney vs Spears underscores how tricky it is to make a credible documentary about a celebrity under duress without repeating many of the gestures that treat fame as the sine qua non of American culture.

Fauci is at its best when it draws parallels between the pandemics that define Dr. Fauci’s career. It vexes when it leans on straightforward biography

The melancholy result is that the painter with the spectacularly lulling voice, the hallmark ’fro and the liberating kindness remains a mystery; not the brand that’s made millions but the guy who touched millions.

To say that Resort to Love is slight would be akin to snatching a romance novel out of your closest friend’s hands while she sits reading and sipping a margarita on a beach. Why would you do that? It’s summer. Leave the girl her pleasures.

It’s not groundbreaking but, written by Bass, the movie serves as a fine reminder of the pleasures of a female-focused story with the stuff of adulthood at its core.

Although Safety takes its cues from a true story, its beats are comfortingly familiar — or annoyingly so, depending on your fondness for the rhythms of the genre.