Natalia Winkelman

As the story’s melodrama grows repetitive, so do the visuals.

One is quick to forgive faulty plot machinations when an action movie really revs; Role Play merely spins its wheels.

Alongside Oplev’s commitment to genuine feeling and complexity — you won’t find easy solutions here — Grabol’s performance shines.

Total Trust is not a chronicle of how circumstances can go from a simmer to a boil, but rather a moment’s temperature check.

The issues explored in Who We Become are essential, but the film’s content can occasionally feel superficial.

Lovingly detailed and accented by an aching score from Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died in March, Monster is one of the finest films of the year, and its structure — like its circle of characters — carries secrets that can only be unraveled through patience and empathy.

You will finish the film agreeing that what the doctors saw is crucial. But what it all means for America’s most enduring mystery is less clear.

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

You may chuckle, but it’s hard to tell if the movie is laughing with you.

In her feature debut, Tran is intermittently successful at capturing the listlessness that defines that liminal space between adolescence and adulthood; as “Waiting” progresses, malaise envelops her characters like the gray fog over the shoreline.

The film is clear in showing how the media put her into boxes: a traitor, a terrorist, a progressive, an innocent, a lost cause. But who is Reality Winner? This documentary doesn’t dig deeper than her patently well-meaning exterior.

The result evokes an adult puppet show crossed with a graphic novel, and like the budding female identity the film untangles, the whole thing takes a little time getting used to. Once you do, it is remarkably beautiful.

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.

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.

What are the odds that a premise as unimaginative as this one should emerge as a sturdy little romantic drama?

Though it is not an unpleasant experience, it is a limp one.

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

This energetic, enjoyable movie does not set out to break ground, but in putting centerstage those who are typically left on the sidelines, the movie emerges as a rousing success.

Knappenberger does, thankfully, make space for survivors to share their own accounts, and their vulnerability lends authority to an otherwise anonymous film.

In a film whose moral emphasizes the necessity of artistic freedom, there is a deceptive simplicity to this aesthetic style that makes it all the more special.

Billion Dollar Heist is not totally bankrupt, but in mining its central cybercrime for tidbits while smoothing over its complexities, the film erodes its power both as seminar and spectacle.

The script does find time for a feeble feminist gesture — the story’s sole woman can cock a rifle — and a monologue about racism. These efforts to update the tale are about as successful as those of the sorry crew, whose fates were written over a century ago.

The story, though neatly plotted, is engaging enough. The trouble lies in its staging.

Susie Searches is more than comfortable drawing on the staid tropes of its genre, particularly those that paint mental illness as a path to depravity. But despite its narrative shortcomings, the film builds a tense and mischievous mood that acts as its hook.

We learn precious little about the personal lives of these impressive individuals. When it comes to what drove them, how they associated with others or how they dealt with danger, The Deepest Breath offers only surface-level observations.

The internet moves quickly, perhaps too quickly for an overview this unfocused.

Not even the matriarchal link at the story’s center feels satisfying, its good intention strangled by the plotty chaos.

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

Take Care of Maya is grueling, but it is also oddly deficient, wanting for the precision and perspective essential to deriving insight from profound trauma.

This is a sweet, uncomplicated story relayed with enough entrancing dance breaks to fill an American halftime show.

The film, which examines cases in which sexual assault survivors are charged with false reporting, is the rare entry whose revelations feel cogent, earned and memorable.

This is an engrossing documentary, and one that raises questions about the ethics of intervening (or not) in the lives of people struggling to get by. That these queries hover unresolved may leave viewers uneasy, but it also positions us alongside the subjects, waiting for a solution that’s yet to arrive.

The film might aim to deliver an aesthetic and emotional jolt, but it is the mundane, interpersonal moments that linger.

A tender tale, The Starling Girl twirls through a spate of clichés — many surround Jem’s relationship to her alcoholic father, Paul (Jimmi Simpson) — but sticks the landing thanks to Parmet’s rapt attention to the shifting desires of her central character.

When it comes to the causes of this mental health crisis or the precise ways in which it manifests, the documentary falters, unable to distill its empirical material into insights.

A formulaic family melodrama . . . which stars a stable of equine and human performers gamely mounting a Nicholas Sparks-like story line complete with romance across social classes, a conniving antagonist and grave health crises.

In tuning the project to the key of advocacy, the directors have created a film to nod along with, not one that unpacks complexity.

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.

There is little story beyond the snatches of conversation we receive, but Human Flowers of Flesh brims with visual and aural detail from the rocky coasts and gurgling reefs.

Here is a documentary that casts a clear eye on the offenses of an industry driven by capitalism while never losing sight of the workers whose safety and success should be that profession’s number one priority.

As Solange’s teenage woes bubble up and then cool to a simmer, Ropert reveals a knack for calibrating emotion. It can be agony to accept one’s parents as people with needs and faults all their own, and Ropert observes Solange’s coming-of-age lucidly and without judgment.

Peren is clever to favor mischief against a backdrop of gloom, but in doing so she draws a frustrating distance between her subject and the audience.

At once a story of legislative struggle and an admiring profile of a crusader, The First Step sometimes gets bogged down in bromides about community and common ground rather than unpacking the specifics of Jones’s approach and how it differs from his detractors’.

"Huesera" is the type of staggering supernatural nightmare that is as transfixing as it is terrifying.

The film lacks the indelible details and authentic feeling necessary to encode it in long-term memory. Indeed, soon after finishing the movie, it already feels far away.

As moody and messy as its eponym, Baby Ruby aspires to demonstrate how postpartum psychosis can feel like a horror movie. It just fails to make the condition feel like a particularly convincing or cohesive horror movie.

One hopes that such access would yield new insights into the church. But as the events unspool, the film struggles to crystallize more than a handful of compelling points.

Within this framework, Avishag’s wants and needs are not quite legible enough to trace a satisfying arc, but unspooling under the film’s stylish, judgment-free gaze, her interactions are alluring nonetheless.

We already know that Menzel can belt to the back row; a richer profile would have coaxed out a more intimate voice.

Once the ash settles, we long for insight, but only the trauma lingers on.

As familiar as this tale of female transformation feels, there is an authentic sweetness to Darby and Capri’s fledgling friendship. Their bond resuscitates a movie that might otherwise have been dead on arrival.

Despite its contemporary New York City setting, The Son seems to have appropriated a midcentury understanding of mental illness, and the emotion on display feels even more artificial than the rooftop vista erected outside the windows of Peter’s industrial-chic Manhattan loft.

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

That marketing campaigns are built on fallacies isn’t exactly revelatory, but in pairing his excavation of the diamond myth with new inquiries into how the industry is evolving (and how it’s stagnating), Kohn strikes on something valuable.

If Guadagnino sought to reflect the romance of Ferragamo’s red carpet creations, his storytelling is at once more conventional and more awkward in construction. Forget feet; defter hands might have helped.

Bursts of experimental style feel at odds with the movie’s core: a simplistic parable of pervasive sexism.

In interviews, the director Patricia E. Gillespie has said that while pitching the film, people often asked whether she could cover or blur Judy’s face to shield audiences from her burns. Gillespie refused, and her resolve to train her camera on Judy gives the film an unflinching quality.

The engine of this movie is snark, and Dever, overtaxed with carrying the comedy, brings a dauntlessness to the role, even during more daft moments.

Significant Other does not reinvent the genre, but its narrative flourishes make for an exciting outing.

God’s Creatures is ultimately a movie about the collision between a mother’s fidelity and her moral conscience, and Watson is terrific at telegraphing how these instincts grind against each other to terrifying ends.

Cinema prizes a good man making history, but this story’s heroes are manifold.

Through a series of arresting images, the director Rahul Jain presents a city on the verge of apocalypse.

Even when the movie wants for tension, it brims with playful style.

Addiction is a complex, challenging topic, and Our American Family, in its sharp specificity, handles it with grace.

Had the movie emerged as a friskier game of eat the rich, it might have had a fighting chance of survival. Instead, it’s middling, morbid pap.

Never mind that Look Both Ways seems to posit that, for women, child rearing and a career are in relative opposition — when Natalie comes to a fork in the road, the movie hardly lets her look both ways. It bulldozes her down one path, and then the other.

The real account of Robert Freegard might have been unbelievable. Its dramatization, however, is preposterous.

Wedding Season is mostly flavorless, but its interest in capitalistic success inspires a pucker of bad taste.

In spite of the movie’s tropes, Haapasalo clearly understands that, when you’re young, desire can feel confusing or gratifying, thrilling or overwhelming. In her snapshot of contemporary girlhood, Haapasalo contains all of the above — making the movie an affecting achievement that never feels less than loving.

This hook piques curiosity — at least enough for a coy eyebrow raise. Light intrigue is often not enough, though, and in this case, the movie strains to sustain charm.

Even during more analytic or crusading sections, the documentary’s mood never strays from inspirational.

While its stylings, including perky music and cutesy graphics, can sometimes verge on trite, its insights and guidance are encouraging, actionable and necessary.

Like many other movies trailing a lone gunslinger, Sniper: The White Raven builds to a tense face-off, which for our hero comes to represent a small measure of justice.

The quiet candor with which Hannam addresses issues of masculinity, and how it intersects with an Indigenous and queer identity, elevates this otherwise conventional story.

While the movie sustains levity, its lack of subtlety — and a lack of stakes, save for sweepstakes — make for an altogether bland bonanza.

With her feature debut, Branham exposes her hand as filmmaker, and reminds us that Being BeBe is only a snapshot of Ngwa’s persona; the real thing is so much richer.

Hollywood Stargirl could be seen as a filmmaking exercise. How do you build a story around a character who was auxiliary by design? Hart’s solutions are manifold, but her most effective one is to quash the grating altruism that drove Stargirl in the first movie.

Directed by Andrew Nackman in his feature debut, Paulie Go! unabashedly aspires to the sentimental whimsy that once swamped film festivals, and certain moments — including a self-consciously awkward dance scene — seem near quotations of dozens of offbeat movies that came before.

What could have been an urgent inquiry into the systems enabling sex criminals becomes something more pedestrian — a stylized replay of a game of cat and mouse.

If this spin on the tale is not quite diverting enough to justify its existence, the movie, directed by Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum, is at least not a soulless exercise.

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.

It’s an earnest look at the collateral damage surrounding addiction, and the movie is at its strongest when it homes in on the experiences of Ethan and Derek. But as the main characters of the movie learn, compassion alone isn’t always enough.

Consistently intriguing and occasionally hilarious, the movie does not depict sex itself. Instead, the characters eat food items that become objects of titillation, lust and pleasure: the sticky goo around soybeans, chili oil sizzling in a wok.

There is something insincere in this movie’s manner, an aloofness that masquerades as satire but repels inquiry or emotion. “Dual” takes a worthy idea and throws a smoke bomb in its middle, leaving the audience to squint through the haze.

Conventional but genuine, Metal Lords comprehends the riot of adolescent emotions and the many ways teenagers manage them.

This sensational documentary feels bankrupt at its core.

Fendt is more interested in tracing the architecture of their ennui than considering its cause or consequences, and the movie observes their leisure with a warm gaze.

Had Atlantide granted deeper access to Daniele and Maila, these images might have lent a moody complement to the characters and their struggles. As is, any sense of meaning is cast adrift in a sea of pretty pictures.

Blissfully under two hours, The Adam Project is no modern classic. But it does benefit from an affecting finale that pays special attention to Adam’s strained relationship with his father.

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.

Ostrochovsky often begins shots with characters frozen in place for several seconds before they launch into action, as if they were chess pieces moved by God across the bare lines of the seminary’s crumbling stone architecture.

More than anything else, Diwan seems interested in exploring how, at many points in history, young women had no choice but to bear this particular burden alone.

Too many works aimed at younger age groups ooze with sentimentality or buckle under a condescending tone. Here, in figurative voice-over full of imagery, we receive Lennie’s unbridled imagination and worldview.

When, and in which picturesque city, Henry and María will acknowledge their mutual affection is the burning question of this romantic comedy trifle, which offers a few laughs and many more exasperated groans.

A misfire that’s as stilted as it is inert.

Of all the movie’s sins, [Scrat's] omission is unforgivable.

Cave has an imaginative sense of camera placement, and she’s an expert at inserting ultra-close-up shots at precisely the right moment to induce a laugh, gasp, or shiver. Her camera is always in service of the story, rather than distracting from it with artifice.

Here’s a tragic tale: Once upon a time, an action-adventure drama began production. Nearly eight years, a title change and a new distribution plan later, the movie finally sees the light of day. Nothing about it feels worth the wait.