Natalia Winkelman

It’s a stylized spectacle, and the effects can feel discordant. Conceição eventually chips through the horror genre enamel to expose a message about the futility of war, but the tale’s miscellany of moods dulls its ultimate power.

The utility of an energetic character study of depraved opioid kingpins is questionable. But the documentary unspools with enough style and spark to engage.

This is a hermetic story, but one wishes that Siev had balanced its coziness with acuity.

Brazen occasionally scratches the same itch as does a cop procedural, or a Lifetime drama so formulaic you foresee every beat.

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.

While its salute to the artists flicks at the cynical side of their industry, it is less a probing profile than a backstage pass for fans of the band (a.k.a. Blinks) old and new.

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.

Playing With Sharks would like to position Valerie as both intrepid diver and valiant activist, but with its focus on thrills and gills, the film goes light on the context needed to reconcile these two identities.

This sweeping, stagy movie sags and drags, never quite able to shake the weight of its own loftiness.

Girls State endears, but it also leaves viewers with the sense that, for a film about young women eager to take on the world’s challenges, the movie could stand to tackle a few more.

By avoiding complexity, Rising Phoenix preserves its inspiring mood, but offers only a platform for champions who already dominate the arena.

Williams, an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, is an expert orchestrator of naturalism. The trouble is that lucha libre, built on glitz, is anything but naturalistic. The self-assured freedom Saúl channels in bed never makes its way into scenes in the ring, which tend to tire when they should dazzle.

The trouble with Reptile is that this impressive moment-to-moment control does not extend to the contours of the broader story, which the writers overstuff with clumsy twists and contrived devices.

Throughout, the film unabashedly adopts Putnam’s doctrine: Become a joiner or democracy is doomed. Some of the film’s points feel simplistic, and questions linger.

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.

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.

Raim is interested in how Jewison sought to preserve the story’s essence while making creative updates, and in doing so “Fiddler’s Journey” touches on issues of Jewish representation but does not interrogate them.

Rodgers, a sheepish and at times bewildered guide, seems ill-equipped to reconcile Adams’s reflections with his admiration for Smith and “Chasing Amy,” and instead pivots the story to focus on his own personal and professional evolution.

The Smartest Kids in the World aspires to offer a study of teaching methods worldwide, but the documentary (on Discovery+) contains little rigor. It’s a dippy lecture in motion.

Here is a documentary that invites us to delight in the unexpected pairing of a famed funny lady and a hunky musician — but without analysis or nuance. Better to flip on a few “I Love Lucy” reruns instead.

This implication that virility trumps effeteness is, amid an otherwise straightforward comedy, an uncomfortably regressive way to tell the story of how people vie for power in hard times.

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.

A tale of romance and revenge that culminates in a shootout, The Dead Don’t Hurt is not a total misfire. There are moments of excitement, and the film’s semi-nonlinearity allows for a few midpoint surprises about characters we thought we knew.

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.”

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

Despite its foundation in reality, Radical is as by the books as it gets.

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.

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.