Natalia Winkelman

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.

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.

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.

Its revelations about gender, sexuality and identity tend toward the obvious, and sometimes veer into the facile.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Even as the gifted actresses trade jabs and punchlines gamely, the moments leave a sour taste.

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

It’s a somewhat rote exercise in soul-searching, and the script lacks subtlety. (At one point, a character actually says, “you have found yourself.”) But the experience is still a worthy one for our furry leading man.

Its devotion to frights makes it memorable.

With a bolder and broader framework, Broken Harts might have been more than fast food for true-crime obsessives.

The movie gracefully captures the rhythms of intimacy, how it deepens quicker in stolen time. But even as they develop a kinship, the women themselves remain ciphers.

A work of image and mood, Bonjour Tristesse captures the mythopoetic wonder of an adolescent summer, and the effect is trancelike.

Kaur acts as an amiable anchor, gamely embodying a mother and a daughter across time periods.

What “Turtles” does offer in surplus is texture, thanks to Marks’s springy, stylish direction.

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’.

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.

Fortunately, Summer of 69 is a two-hander, and Fineman brings comic chops and genuine feeling to playing the tutor with a heart of gold.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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