Peter Debruge

It was on this film that Scodelario met Walker. The couple are now married, which suggests there’s a “happily ever after” to be found somewhere in this froufrou film maudit.

Bourboulon hatches a second-rate romance, rather than detailing the rich, real-life drama that swirled around Eiffel’s controversial endeavor.

It’s an old-fashioned literary fable, spiked with shots of grimacing men with sunburned faces blasting one another with shotguns that wouldn’t be out of place in a Sergio Leone movie.

In most respects, Eggers is a unique artist with strong, singular ideas of how to script, stage and pace his films, and while The Northman is nothing if not a signature addition to a most original oeuvre — no one but Eggers would or could have reimagined “Hamlet” thus — it lacks the element of surprise that made “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse” feel like instant classics.

Is this supposed to be some kind of sitcom? A thriller? A provocative #MeToo statement on sexual dynamics in the workplace? Yes, all of the above, it turns out.

It’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of her project, and it’s Kingdon’s work as editor that makes Ascension such a remarkable achievement. She organizes all these disparate scenes into a logical upward progression, and even though we seldom know where we are or who exactly we’re observing, these foreign situations are relatable, engaging and often unforgettable.

While “The Secrets of Dumbledore” doesn’t exactly embrace simplicity, the screenplay — no longer credited to Rowling alone, but co-written by stalwart “Harry Potter” adapter Steve Kloves — feels far more focused. Happily, the execution proves that much easier to follow.

Judd Apatow made a movie. A very bad movie.

An hour and a half would’ve been a perfectly fine run-time, whereas at two hours and change, “Sonic 2” wears out its welcome well before it turns into yet another phone-it-in franchise entry.

Few directors could get away with giving audiences so little context or plot, but the Zürchers succeed in piquing our curiosity, which is all one really needs to sustain a film.

Innuksuk approaches everything with such a generous, supportive spirit, it seems churlish to focus on shortcomings in a film with so much personality. ... "Slash/Back" seems bound to find a cult following, but it will mean the most to Inuit audiences, for whom standing up to invaders is more than just another genre-movie cliché.

Soft & Quiet is deeply unpleasant to watch, but that’s the point.

This erotic thriller is still sexy and plenty entertaining, mind you, but it’s just not very useful insofar as what it says about real relationships.

[Morosini] holds back the personal stuff you can tell a stranger but not your dad — the kind of material good comedians build their shows around — making the result feel like a sitcom more than a brutally honest movie.

Gainsbourg doesn’t cram the film with all that much material, and spares her mom the embarrassment of showing her personal clutter. She essentially goes easy on Birkin, asking intimate questions but settling for shallow answers.

Turns out, this movie isn’t so much about space as it is about time travel, or more specifically, taking Linklater and his followers back more than half a century.

Full to bursting with humor, emotion and curiosity, 32 Sounds is a uniquely mind-expanding plunge into a dimension of the human experience so many of us take for granted, a rare and rewarding sonic journey with the potential to enrich our lives.

Even at the movie’s masks-on SXSW Film Festival premiere, The Lost City was a breath of fresh air: the kind of breezy two-hour getaway that doesn’t take itself too seriously, delivering screwball banter between Bullock and Tatum — a guilty-pleasure treasure hunt that pretends to be more progressive than it really is by alternating between who’s saving whom.

Everything Everywhere is ultimately too much of a good thing, a novel idea driven to the point of exhaustion.

Irresistibly cute and thoroughly unashamed of its own silliness, Turning Red may be second-tier Pixar, but the emotions run every bit as deep as in the studio’s best.

This grounded, frequently brutal and nearly three-hour film noir registers among the best of the genre, even if — or more aptly, because — what makes the film so great is its willingness to dismantle and interrogate the very concept of superheroes.

Writer-director Jared Frieder’s feature debut feels like the LGBT equivalent of “Juno”: snappy and refreshingly nonjudgmental in dealing with the consequences of a risky one-night stand.

Dog is a lowbrow but by no means lazy crowd-pleaser, one where the fun Tatum and company took in making it translates directly to the pleasure we take in watching.

As with nearly all great drama, The Line is about conflict, although this particular narrative feels downright radical in the way it rejects aggression as an acceptable means of resolving problems.

If you’re picturing shades of Kubrick’s “The Killing,” but with better clothes, fewer bullets and a self-effacing English fellow quietly trying to defuse the situation, you wouldn’t be far off.

To call “Flux Gourmet” an acquired taste would be an understatement. It’s really more of an elaborate inside joke by Strickland on the peculiar relationship between artists and the institutions that fund, develop and encourage their folly.

The result is an aggressively unfunny look at human-robot relations in a garish, cartoonishly rendered future.

Catch the Fair One is activist filmmaking at its most compelling. Before you run away from the notion, consider this: It doesn’t feel like this tough, relentlessly dark thriller is trying to push some kind of political point, even if so many of its creative choices succeed in doing exactly that.