Natalia Winkelman

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

A crafty reveal does not a clever film make, and even at a merciful 80 minutes, the device eventually feels more tired than the sullen Erin, who soldiers on through her suffering.

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

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.

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.

Pelage and plumage noticeably lack the tactile quality of a Pixar extravaganza, but the animation gets a pass for the movie’s purposes — namely, to impart a message that communities should trust each other, whether they’re covered in rotely-rendered feathers or fur.

Genuine sweetness can be found in Emily’s fidelity to her rowdy new best friend. Still, naturalism is hard to fake, and it’s difficult to divorce Clifford from the lines of code that animate him.

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

As attentive as Close to You is to family dynamics, its dialogue, which the actors largely improvised, rarely achieves verisimilitude.

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.

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

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.

Frustratingly, the documentary declines to probe Demers’s evolving relationship to his activism and newfound fame.

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.

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.

This is, after all, a situational comedy, in which the laughs spring from reaction shots and line deliveries. Luckily, the actors prove up to the task.

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

That Palmer eventually embraces Sam as an ally in misfitdom is inevitable. So is the annoyance inspired by this prosaic masculine melodrama.

After so much media coverage, certain details of the events feel overly familiar. But the director, Sarah Gibson, is often able to put the episodes into fresh contexts.

Directed by Amy Koppelman and based on her novel of the same name, A Mouthful of Air aspires to show how depression can sully even the loveliest of scenes. The scenes the movie chooses, however, play like a parody of white privilege.

Kapadia is a gifted storyteller in both modes, yet one wishes for a version of “2073” in which the veil between them was more permeable. As the film makes clear, they may soon be one and the same.

Wolf may lead with an open curiosity, but in tackling big ideas about identity, openness is not always enough.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It’s inspiring stuff, rendered stodgy and repetitive.