Natalia Winkelman

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The History of Sound doesn’t trust its own gentleness, and the inertia of the filmmaking gives the whole affair a detached, try-hard feeling.

The earnest mood and regional touches of Tinā, a New Zealand movie that centers on a choir instructor who teaches her students to harmonize, distinguish it from others using the familiar formula.

While an early, silly death . . . suggests an exuberant self-awareness a la Quentin Tarantino, other scenes, like those that position Edie and John as star-crossed lovers, indicate that this movie’s melodrama takes itself deadly seriously. But it’s hard for the audience to do so in a story that asks us to not merely suspend disbelief, but slaughter it.

If the dearth of character development is a gag, Diciannove doesn’t offer much of a punchline. But Tortorici’s filmmaking is stylish enough to make even the slipperiest sequences pop.

No Sleep Till is an understated — and somewhat sleepy — film. Its mood of boredom tinged with dread sometimes verges on outright listlessness.

Because she lacks a conception of colonialism, Davidtz sometimes struggles to negotiate the film’s fidelity to her point of view with a more complete picture of the war.

The director, Luis Ortega, doesn’t give much reason to care about Remo’s conflict — the protagonist’s catatonia inspires the same in the viewer — and instead exhausts his efforts on a mannered blankness of style and mood.

In his first feature, Kandhari makes use of morbid humor and expressive imagery, including stop-motion effects. He rarely relies on dialogue and favors a fuzzier plot, which leaves the story with a shapeless and sometimes confusing midsection.

Any genuine feeling emanates from Lily. Ferreira pitches herself into the trite story line with enthusiasm, and her verve breathes life into even the most leaden lines.

The film’s biggest letdown lies in its cursory tour of who Hutchins was apart from her final hours. Despite testimony from Hutchins’s friends that repeatedly references her artistry, Mason rarely incorporates clips of Hutchins’s cinematography outside “Rust.”

It’s a middling entry into the biographical sports movie genre, and the director, Ash Avildsen, cannot resist pummeling his audience with a simplistic girl-power message.

Acting as the film’s teetering anchor, Seyfried channels a fascinating blend of composure and chaos that, in a less muddled movie, would have sung. Yet here, her portrayal of an assured woman unraveling under pressure merely lends a haunting note to a tale that strikes as simultaneously laborious and opaque.

A Sloth Story suffers from a plasticky visual design. The characters seem stiff, like action figures, and their food items, meant to look appetizing, are often rendered as colored medallions.

All the promise of this premise is squandered in Lin’s adaptation, which in style and structure hews to hackneyed convention at every turn.

Some might call it a “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” for fans of European cinema. Others might say it’s a trifle. The film’s ending, however, amounts to a bemused shrug.

While watching Andrew Ahn’s amiable dramedy, which expands on the original premise while maintaining its central themes of found family and tolerance, one rarely questions the story’s relevance. More vitally, it lacks panache.

Suffers from the discord between the real-life conflicts that make up its setting and the cartoonish characters who propel its plot.

Squint your eyes against the specifics, and the odyssey tends to deliver a mood that fluctuates along a scale of benign to bright.