Roxana Hadadi

The result is a twisty-turny plot that sometimes feels like a family drama, sometimes like a legal thriller, with Bahkshi delivering a bombshell, allowing the film’s characters time to react to it, and then dropping another secret that is even more shocking than the first.

Filmmaker Zeina Durra’s entrancing, languorous Luxor wonders about the allure of the backward gaze and the uncertainty inspired by an unknowable future, and co-stars Andrea Riseborough and Karim Saleh are practically perfect in this thoughtful romance.

Sex can be a rigid rubric of performance for some and a fluid experiment in expression for others. The friction between those two perspectives fascinates Femme, a volatile, sensuous revenge film in which the body and its desires don’t lie.

Thoroughly grisly and mostly entertaining, “The Mortuary Collection” is a satisfying choice for the spooky season.

Language Lessons is an alternately comforting and challenging watch, and between this and Morales’s other 2021 directorial effort, Plan B, she is making plain the winsome appeal of films about platonic love.

Freaky boasts such energetic performances from the thoroughly game Kathryn Newton and Vince Vaughn that the horror-comedy breezes by in a pleasant, amusing way, no matter how reductive its central conceit gets.

The failure of The Wanting Mare is in how superficial its world building is, and how unexplored its greatest questions remain. Technically, the film’s use of visual effects is unquestionably impressive, but all that CGI is in service of a narrative so underdeveloped that its 88-minute run-time sometimes feels like an eternity.

In spite of a few nail-biting sequences, Run is more of a slog than a sprint.

Richardson’s task is to play off everyone else’s broadness, and his ease in doing so smooths over the rougher patches of Werewolves Within.

The Last Showgirl is reluctant to abandon the limelight. Amid its hesitation for resolution, though, it proves how much more Anderson has left to give.

A B-movie designed by people who knew exactly what kind of enjoyable trash they were making, Jolt is unabashedly silly, sloppily written, and overly reliant on the likability of Beckinsale and fellow cast members Stanley Tucci and Jai Courtney. But it’s also a breezily entertaining reminder of how delightful it is to watch Beckinsale get pissed off.

A better version of Harriet might have kept the focus squarely locked on the real-life hero at its center, instead of defining her through the relationship with the man who once owned her.

Put aside the (lack of) realism of any of this and it’s thoroughly pleasurable.

By probing at the ways people are on their best behavior while inherently personifying the worst effects of capitalism and greed, and knowing when to abandon modesty for brutality, Jones and Williams turn The Feast into one of the year’s most smartly conceived, plainly effective horrors.

Funny Boy falters when trying to link together the personal and political, making for a well-intentioned film that never delivers much depth.

There’s a lovely chemistry between Gamal, who Shawky met at Egypt’s Abu Zaabal Leper Colony, and Abdelhafiz. Both first-time actors, they capture the dynamic of two people pushed away from society who genuinely grow to feel love for each other.

Horse Girl’s big weakness is that it can’t decide how much ambiguity to provide its central character, or how seriously it wants to present Sarah’s breakdown (or, if you read the film another way, her awakening).

A coming-of-age story that melds fantastical elements with its exploration of what it’s like to grow up looking different from everyone else, The True Adventures of Wolfboy, with its affecting performances and direct rejection of normalcy, works like a charm.

To the credit of The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, the film knows its pop-culture touchstones (Groundhog Day and Time Bandits) and acknowledges the influence those Harold Ramis and Terry Gilliam classics have on its YA story. That doesn’t make the film particularly unique, but at least it makes The Map of Tiny Perfect Things honest.

When The Persian Version shifts to the film-within-the-film Leila is writing and nudges her aside to tell her mother, Shireen’s, story, Keshavarz’s feature finds its performative core and explodes into emotional vibrancy.

Its depiction of toxic masculinity and bloodthirstiness within the U.S. Army is blunted by an overly passive lead performance and a lack of specificity in its storytelling.

It’s too gutless to actually untangle the web of selfishness, Islamophobia, and privilege it weaves around its protagonists.

Amid the paper-thin plot, stilted script, inartful editing, and imbalanced character development, Jolie stands unblemished. She isn’t the only good thing about the otherwise rote Those Who Wish Me Dead, but she doesn’t have much competition, either.

While the young actors draw us into this recognizable world of secret notes and schoolyard fights, Mouaness’ insistence that love is a unifying force and opened-hearted acceptance is all we need doesn’t quite match the intensity of the aggression and bloodshed that the film is re-creating.

Filmmaker Freida Lee Mock draws from photographs, video footage, and audio recordings of Ginsburg; collects interviews with mentees, colleagues, and fans; and utilizes animated sequences of courtroom proceedings to pad out this 89-minute documentary. That tactic means that the documentary is essentially stitched together by available archival material, and makes for an uneven balance.

The film makes the most of its sparseness, using the strong performances of its ensemble cast (including a reliably excellent Margot Robbie) to question the accepted boundaries between right and wrong, citizen and outlaw.

Pleasant but unchallenging.

Geraldine Viswanathan has been steadily working her way through the coming-of-age subgenre, on her way to becoming a star. In the open-hearted romantic comedy The Broken Hearts Gallery, the charismatic whirlwind of an actress is vivacious and lovable.