Natalia Winkelman

Ultimately, Two Women is less a message movie than a featherweight comedy, gesturing at big ideas about sexual politics before settling in as an amusingly mischievous diversion.

In his first feature, the writer and director Joel Alfonso Vargas takes a rather unremarkable premise and unspools it with sedulous care.

There is charm in the film’s allusions to New York City indie filmmaking, like the crew member who fibs that he’s shooting a mayonnaise commercial. But that specificity does not extend to Simon and Bruce’s bond, which consists of parallel play or the odd story about getting too stoned.

Two creative decision makers more at ease behind the scenes, they are, perhaps, not the most natural chroniclers of their own careers and social lives, and as the film goes on, it strains to arrive at even the most basic personal revelations.

Although chiefly a straightforward — and at points repetitive — synopsis of the events, Fukushima: A Nuclear Nightmare distinguishes itself in its devotion to elevating these men as heroes.

The American dream gets a quirky wardrobe upgrade in Idiotka, a lightweight but winning comedy that feels like a Netflix movie’s indie cousin.

The saving grace of Midwinter Break is the pair of stellar leads, who would be appealing to watch just fumbling for their reading glasses. That also happens to be the pinnacle of action, however, within this prosaic drama.

Kramer has constructed an ironically detached artifact that invites questions about ownership and image and then bats them away, making it a frustrating experience with an intriguing veneer.

The men give Jimpa a warm, intergenerational quality, gesturing at the power of queer family over time. If only the film didn’t ask the audience to invest in so very many subplots; the clutter ends up sucking the air out of all of them.

It’s so earnest, so vulnerable in its portrait of the disappointments and anxieties of young adulthood, that one tends to forgive its tweer flights of fancy.

Leviticus is not a perfect horror film . . . But the film’s moody atmosphere — including a soundtrack full of clanks and bangs — makes it an enjoyably disquieting ride.

The documentary tries to heighten the stakes of Talankin’s story by casting his efforts under a pall of danger, dread or distress. But these bids for drama are far less persuasive than the horrifying raw footage Talankin captures, such as one scene in which young students are coached to march down a hallway, as if preparing for battle.

Here is a movie whose atavistic excursion through time transfixes, even as its psychology remains as fuzzy as a photograph smeared by motion.

We Bury the Dead is most haunting when it gestures at a world dazed with trauma and explores a path to personal closure through collective efforts.

The story, about a dying matriarch and her stricken adult children, paints by numbers with stock characters and cloying scenarios.

Sending up costumey, upstairs-downstairs tropes, the movie seldom lets five seconds pass without a wisecrack, pratfall or sight gag, sometimes all three stacked on top of each other.

Expressive visuals and evocative scenes, including one involving an overactive meerkat, make Left-Handed Girl a memorable family affair. It’s only when the film introduces one too many social realist tropes . . . that the melodrama grows unwieldy.

If earlier segments of Middletown suggest that we’re building to something revelatory, the latter half feels a bit like a train that chugs on aimlessly after passing its destination. It’s a pleasant ride. It just lacks a little edge.

While the film centers on the comfort Anand finds with Balya and vice versa, it is also an elegantly reserved study of Anand’s grief, finding a rhythm in its scenes of ritual that allows us to ache alongside.

Bunny is a New York movie that eschews realism but still brims with authentic affection, and in doing so, bursts with life.

A David and Goliath story with big feelings, edifying speeches and a swelling score, Sarah’s Oil is a movie that will surprise nobody. Viewers might even make out a regressive strain reinforcing the feel-good mood.

While DaCosta’s intelligence as a writer and director makes Hedda a standout film, her penchant for play makes it a delightful one.

It’s formulaic and predictable, with goofy writing and clumsy editing. The saving grace is the actors, who manage to perform even the most ridiculous lines with a straight face.

Here is a protagonist who clearly straddles the line between right and wrong; the trouble is that in Roofman, that line wobbles, leaving the movie somewhere between a fun-loving caper and a finger-wagging morality tale.

In hewing closely to Steve, the whole affair takes on a grating note of self-sacrifice, of perseverance through suffering.

What comes next is a case of sensory overload without substance, complete with nondescript pop songs and an array of outfits — each purchasable online! — for Gabby and the gang. Even Wiig, giving it her all as a modern clone of Cruella de Vil, appears somewhat shipwrecked amid the sugary material.

Watching Matthias on the job is entertaining enough, even as the movie’s allegorical ambitions are stymied by a narrative inertia, and by a sneaking suspicion that we’ve seen this sort of social commentary before.

It could take a lifetime, or at least the sustained attention of an aficionado, to untangle all the lore. But the themes — solidarity and self-interest, allegiance and betrayal, love and loathing — are easy to follow. For the casual fan, the chief reason to seek out “Infinity Castle” is for its visuals, which position passionately emotive characters over impressionistic backdrops.