Peter Debruge

The movie provides some nice, memorable bonding moments between Marianne and her subjects, including Cédric (nonactor Dominique Pupin), a decent if slightly pathetic middle-aged man also looking for work. But its portrayal of cleaning women ultimately feels flat, and it’s not clear whether watching Binoche scrub a few toilets is meant to dignify/humanize those stuck doing such chores, or to underscore the lengths to which she’ll go as an actor.

There’s room for infinite points of view behind the camera, as well as among those who do the watching. Offering the tools for unpacking potentially challenging movies, Cousins teaches people how to be better spectators — not by telling them the right way to watch, but by encouraging them to engage more deeply with what they see.

Everything in Red Rocket happens just a little too easily, which is one of the weaknesses of a self-indulgent regional satire that stretches its perhaps-80-minute plot over more than two hours.

With Titane, audiences occasionally just have to give themselves over to the movie’s demented momentum, taking whatever perverse pleasure they can from Ducournau’s willingness to push the boundaries

In the past, the director has been accused of making overly contrived dollhouse movies, and while he repeats many of his favorite tricks — toying with aspect ratios, centering characters in symmetric compositions, revealing a large building in intricate cross-section — this time it feels as if there’s a full world teeming beyond the carefully controlled edges of the frame.

With its haters-be-damned approach to all things carnal, Benedetta is intended to arouse, thereby satisfying the most basic definition of pornography, even if Verhoeven (who claims a certain scholarly interest in the subject as well) does surround the titillating bits with illuminating insights into Renaissance religious life.

The movie’s pulse seldom rises above resting, but the director invites audiences to dive as deep as they want to go into the film’s themes, to read subtext into body language, silence and the space between characters.

The movie’s more interesting for being less obvious.

In this particular cocktail, Carax is boiling lead to Sparks’ soda-pop fizz, sucking all the fun from the root-beer float. What does go well with the French auteur’s honesty-insisting earnestness is Adam Driver’s over-committed lead turn.

“Fear Street” may look like countless horror movies that have come before, but it’s desperately trying to be original, and that may pay off in the two installments to come.

It’s a pleasure to spend an hour and a half in the resurrected company of these two intellects, but the experience feels like the lazy alternative to reading biographies about either man, while the iMovie-style editing strategy of slow-fading between layers of old photographs makes them feel like ghosts of a long-forgotten past.

It’s all engineered to pay off in familiar ways, though the movie isn’t quite as predictable as you might think.

Wish Dragon delivers a whole new world, a new fantastic point of view, and that’s plenty.

Awake is bonkers in a fun way from time to time . . . but gives the distinct impression that the most interesting crises are happening off screen.

The movie feels like both an advertisement for this posh, ultra-modern oasis and a late-20th-century smear of the people and culture one might expect to find there.

The more you start to nitpick this movie, the more innumerable its plot holes appear, until the whole thing collapses in on itself.

The film’s texture is in the details. There’s nothing glamorous about this kind of subsistence, and nothing invented.

Van Grinsven is conscious of consequences, but more interested in exploring the newfound freedoms that technology offers queer self-discovery.

Rogers’ stage play is a smart, mature piece of writing, but one that transfers rather clumsily to the small screen, in part because its makers don’t show quite the same confidence in their audience’s intelligence.

Very little of Spirit Untamed lives up to what the studio is selling.

The director, who brought a wicked edge to pop-culture redux “I, Tonya” a few years back, has rescued Cruella from the predictability of the earlier “101 Dalmatians” remakes and created a stylish new franchise of its own in which a one-time villain has been reborn as the unlikeliest of role models.

Like its source, the movie is a blast, one that benefits enormously from being shot on the streets of Washington Heights.

It can be hard to believe that both the sequel and the instant-classic 2018 original were produced by Michael Bay, a filmmaker who has pushed the moviegoing experience to ear-splitting extremes, since Krasinski so effectively embraces the opposite strategy: Less is more, suggestion can be scarier than showing everything, and few things are more unnerving than silence.

As directed by Taylor Sheridan, Those Who Wish Me Dead offers a much bigger sandbox for the gifted actor-turned-action maven, whose scripts for “Sicario” and “Hell or High Water” have launched him to the front of a genre dominated by CG robots, superheroes and other IP once associated with Saturday morning cartoons. Such movies are plenty popular, but this one marks a welcome departure — one intended for grown-ups seeking more “realistic” diversion — without shortchanging audiences when it comes to either spectacle or sound.

Moya’s vision may be bleak — and “vision” is the right word to describe the Spanish-born director’s stunning capacity to create images and atmosphere — but there’s something unnervingly familiar about the world he creates in his feature debut.

A clever example of creativity thriving within the strict protocols of the coronavirus pandemic, tense confinement thriller Oxygen plays like “Buried” in outer space.

An engaging for-kids ghost story whose fantasy elements are thoughtfully grounded by real-world concerns.