Teo Bugbee

The overwhelming impression is that of shrillness. It’s a tone that might be familiar to those who have experienced a broken heart, but this shallow exercise offers meager opportunity for discomfort to transform into either entertainment or contemplation.

The writer and director, Charlène Favier, had previous experience as a competitive skier, and she is attentive to the textures of mountainside sports and how abuse plays out in this setting.

The film’s writer and director, Jon Garcia, treats the physicality of their romance in a frank way, staging realistic love scenes that show the attraction between the characters. But Garcia is less adept at finding passion in between scenes of sex.

If Markie is undeniably compelling as a subject, the film doesn’t quite match her bravery and her willingness to explore uncharted territory. There are plenty of fly-on-the-wall observations, but little play or introspection besides what Markie is able to offer.

It’s a competent movie, but it doesn’t quite make it to the big leagues.

It’s the cumulative effect of seeing the world through the eyes of these children that makes this movie so deeply joyful. This is a heartening project, a philosophical excavation of a school that abounds with playful optimism.

Some of these central relationships are inappropriate, even dangerous, but the subtlety of Sanga’s filmmaking allows for big twists to come as a genuine surprise. It makes for a successful manipulation of his audience’s expectations, even if the overall effect is a movie that feels slightly detached.

This is a bizarre movie, one that parades confused ideas about care, fantasy and disability with a pride that reads as vanity. It is audacious, in the sense that making it certainly took some audacity.

The observant nature of this character drama offers Zahn in particular the opportunity to expand into new territory. He hasn’t lost the spaciness that once made him a lovable comedic sidekick, but here fatherhood endows that same charm with pathos, even tragedy.

Bliss fails to engage the senses, resulting in cinematic disappointment.

The repetition of the visions and the film’s deliberate pace gives the audience too much time to guess which betrayals haunt Babak and Neda, and this lack of emotional suspense hampers the horror.

It’s a confident debut feature, and a sophisticated acknowledgment of the powerlessness that migrants face.

It’s a buffet of only sour dishes, a rank fete of foulness.

It doesn’t take long to notice that these are earnest, even humorless, women. They are too busy contemplating their daily turmoil to play or crack a joke. As a result, their chemistry never coheres, and the movie flounders under the weight of lifeless sincerity.

The movie plays like a well-crafted game, one with stable rules and safeties, perfectly enjoyable but limited. The director and the performers circle ideas about how intimacy can be manipulated to satisfy artistic ambitions, but the experiment feels easy to leave behind.

Marco’s sourness curdles the confection and his undercooked complaints clack against the movie’s warm tone, sending its simple pleasures into a scatter.

The movie practically vibrates with its own meta tension.

It’s an intriguing interpretation of adolescent discovery, one that uses horror to suggest the dread that comes with finding a sense of self.

Despite the potentially heavy (or heavy-handed) material, Bad Hair is self-consciously and pleasingly campy, and it delivers a new cinematic monster: the sew-in weave.

It’s an inoffensive movie, full of such familiar tropes, it hardly matters if you can keep your eyes open to the end.

The original “American Pie” was tasteless; this version is flavorless.

The documentary fares better when it cuts the interviews and simply follows working class people in their daily lives.

While the documentary successfully champions stunt women’s dignity in the workplace, it lacks finesse — failing to showcase their talents in a way that would be exciting for an audience outside the industry.

Its meticulous visuals do frequently tip into preciousness, yet this cuteness is offset by the movie’s refreshingly direct take on depression and despair. This unusual children’s film may be fussy, but to its credit, it is not frivolous.

Space Dogs commits to its art-house pretensions. The result isn’t pleasant, but it does effectively provoke.

What’s fascinating is Arquette’s vulnerability, both emotionally and physically.

The narrative drifts, but the alienation communicated by the movie’s images feels purposeful and striking.

Though the movie does include footage of drum performances, it doesn’t move at the clip of sticks on snares. Instead, the film listens for this community’s heartbeat, finding its steady pulse just as expected: healthy and strong.

This movie about artistic inspiration is meandering and slight, but, in a way, it provides evidence for why it’s helpful to cast actors with movie-star charisma.

This is a pretty movie to be sure, with attractive cinematography, period costume and production design. But the film has no political or philosophical weight, and it is ultimately a movie that is as hard to take seriously as its somewhat dunderheaded protagonist.

The movie is generous about allowing Mercado to present his view of the world in his own words, but it’s a shame not to be able to see the world through his eyes.

For all the impetuousness of its subjects, this is a film of remarkable respect and restraint — a documentary that carves shape into a messy reality.

A film that feels exploitative, not enlightened.

With each successive trip to the grim vaults, the hard-won dignity of the film’s transgender speakers is brought into sharper and sharper relief.

Here is a movie that presents an intelligent vision of nature. What’s pleasing to the eye is pleasing to the earth — a sentiment the film rigorously supports with science.

The director Maya Newell gains access to both worlds that Dujuan traverses — home and school — and the trust that she seems to have built with all participants is vital to the success of this film.

Marona has three real homes in her life, and past abandonments have taught her that heartbreak waits in every happiness. But fortunately, the film stays buoyant through its unique, boisterous animation.

Parkland Rising passes the low bar of not undermining the people it covers, but by avoiding both research and conflict, it fails to provide a reason for its own existence.

What begins as a movie with two protagonists almost imperceptibly evolves into a movie with just one — a touching demonstration of how narratives that seem inevitably intertwined can unravel.

An unconventional labor story, the movie doesn’t bask in the triumph of rebellion; instead, it’s an introspective portrait of men for whom working is a replacement for living.

Jumping between wildly dissimilar styles makes for an occasionally jarring film. Yet despite this awkwardness, the movie works.

The remembrances are the movie’s heart — not a family secret, but a community’s pride.

Selah and the Spades shimmers with youthful promise, both in front of the camera and behind it.

The aimless characters in Almost Love like to talk through their feelings, their aspirations, their disappointments, but there is little substance in their epiphanies, and the comedy is too low key to make up for its absence.

For audiences who don’t mind being jealous of sick dogs, The Dog Doc is a thought-provoking look at what is missing from modern medicine — for animals and for people.

The writer-director Takashi Doscher forgoes apocalyptic spectacle to focus on the pandemic’s effects on Will and Eva’s romance. Too bad. Most of the scenes could have been lifted from a generic relationship drama, and it is only the couple’s conversation, not their visually desaturated world, that distinguishes them.

The biggest trouble here is in the writing. By the time the film gets around to showing what a character has felt, they have already told the audience twice — and most likely another character has explained as well, just in case anyone missed the memo.

This is canny, passionate filmmaking, a reminder of the power of two-dimensional animation. First, it humanizes, then it astounds.

The trouble with this skimmed approach is that by sidelining historical analysis, the film denies its audience the best defense against distortion, a rational necessity when interpreting a conversation that often seems to happen in code.

Compared to the drama of the competition, the story and its characters always feel slight, an excuse to hang out among Olympians rather than a movie that builds upon (or for that matter critiques) its surroundings.

As a trio, Viance, Zaghouani and Pellizari are bright and full of energy, and Gourmel allows their scenes together to play with improvisational looseness. Their vivacity lends purpose to the entire film.

What starts as a mediocre psychological thriller finishes as a surprisingly toothsome and creative horror film, complete with creature features and journeys into the abyss.

The movie abounds with imagination, but is unfortunately too unnerving — even nauseating — to enjoy.

It’s an unchallenging movie, but as far as unchallenging kids movies go, the actors ensure this one doesn’t fall into soullessness.

Intriguing, but ultimately slight.

In addition to his acting duties, Presley also wrote and directed the film. But while he provides beard and brawn as the heroic musher, he struggles with the technical challenges of editing and staging the run.

The fantasy of The Sky Is Pink is that Aisha’s death allows her to see her mother with adoring omniscience, and the film is never more pleasing than when it revels in the glamorous melodrama of a superstar performing motherhood.

Britt-Marie Was Here is a relatively unchallenging yet ultimately pleasant watch.

Despite some committed performances, particularly from a refreshingly natural Maika Monroe, Villains is a hackneyed farce rich in gimmicks and poor in substance.

The film’s deaf subjects feel creatively and philosophically shortchanged.

The comedy-horror film Satanic Panic is the kind of movie that revels in the details of eviscerations and demonic orgies. With jovial bad taste and a bag of gruesome tricks, the director Chelsea Stardust cheerfully invites her audience to hail Satan.

Bell imbues Brittany with humanity and wit, but all too frequently she is working within the framework of a story that seems hellbent on robbing her character of joy.

Adam is a movie that tackles big ideas about queerness and comes out looking confused — making it an experience that frustrates even as it tries to endear.

Enzo is a bad dog, and his antics play worse for the film’s lack of discipline.

Kramer choreographs action through striking tableaus that follow the group’s shifting dynamics; the score, built from percussion and a chorus of girlish hoots, builds the tension.

The activists of this film, including al-Kateab herself, don’t speak in the language of philosophers or politicians. Their quotidian aspirations — to build a garden, to send their children safely to school — demonstrate the brutality of the government’s response, but they also invite viewers to picture themselves in the shoes of these modest political dissidents.

The result is pleasing — a stadium snow cone, palatable despite being sweetened with corn syrup.

For all of the film’s attention to the contradictory emotional aftermath of loss, its Mongolian escape valve feels strangely obligatory — not a reason to get away from mourning, but a gimmick around which a film about bereavement was built.

It’s a period movie with little style and a family flick wholly lacking in charm or warmth.

Papi Chulo tries to subvert the conceit that casts brown people as uncomplicated support systems for conflicted white people, but lacks the vision to transform these familiar stereotypes.

Yomeddine makes its strongest impression through the direction and performances; at times, the story is rather flimsy.

Miron avoids easy conclusions about what drives Kathy, and he stays with her long enough for her story to surprise. The reward of his patience is a psychological portrait that develops mystery the more it reveals.

Kagerman and Lilja thoughtfully constructed their film, yet they leave nothing for the mind to do besides consume unrelenting tragedy.

In mirroring the gaze of his professorial subjects, Brown rewards audiences with a film that happily weds the scientific and the cinematic.

The director Ben Hernandez Bray began his career in Hollywood as a stuntman, and though too many bones are crunched to describe this film as elegant, Bray directs action with merciless kinetic logic.

By seesawing between bland normalcy and hellishness, Lobo denies his audience the immersive horror that his film’s best images promise.

[A] beautiful but frustratingly shallow Disneynature documentary.

This is an irreverent film, but its lightness is meaningful. With each silly flourish, Olnek offers joy and companionship to a figure whose history was more conveniently presented to generations of readers as solitary.

Storm Boy tries to present itself as a modern fable, where the lessons learned relate directly to present-day concerns over the environment, industrialization and the marginalization of indigenous cultures. But these themes come across as didactic rather than moving.

In satisfying fashion, Slut in a Good Way recognizes the potential for cruelty that exists as teenagers experiment and learn through sex, but its portrait of adolescence never feels less than loving.

Although its protagonist is blessed with a gift for engineering the impossible, Wonder Park is a film where faulty execution betrays a healthy imagination.

In a film where the central horror is the otherworldly absence of personality, the intended fear is undermined by the presence of a mother and son whose flawlessness is itself unnerving.

Where many coming-of-age films build their stories around the discovery of a fixed selfhood, “Giant Little Ones” succeeds when it chooses to treat youthful identity as open to shift with accumulated experience.

As is perhaps appropriate, given the comic occupations of the Reynolds (and the Elliott) family, this unusual, unsettling and terrific little film presents itself not as a domestic opera, but as a family comedy.

For a political thriller to come up with a scheme that feels genuinely rousing, An Acceptable Loss would need the two qualities it most severely lacks: style and substance.

The images serve the dialogue, but they are not given a chance to expand the story, depriving the movie of texture and energy. Danluck dives with Katherine into the depths of grief-stricken obsession, and her film suffocates for want of room to breathe.

Although the film has no grand cinematic ambitions, its unsensationalized focus on these aging bodies invites welcome kindness.

Van Rooijen’s overreliance on herky-jerky jump scares is a pity, because the movie that exists in the silence is surprisingly satisfying.

This is a passion project in the best sense of the word, a movie in which the ingenuity and dedication of the filmmakers illuminate the same qualities in their subjects.

Mirroring its green protagonist, The New Romantic presents an image of sophistication while playing with ideas that are out of its depth.

Mina and Alex seem less like teenagers and more like case studies with traumas rather than personalities. The horror genre can be a pipeline into the dark corners of the psyche, but the impact of The Dark is more clinical than cathartic.

It falls on the performances to add subtle touches to the narrative’s broad strokes. George is admirably warm as the earthbound Hazel, and Dorff suggests the selfishness of his character’s selfless desperation.

White and Monroe demonstrate natural chemistry, and they discretely suggest the private experiences of their characters, the youthful doubts that can’t be extinguished by passion. In unpretentious fashion, After Everything portrays the bittersweetness of a first love that blooms in crisis.

The production design displays a genuine enthusiasm for the decorative kitsch of the Halloween season, and the flashes of giddy craftiness beneath the slick style almost compensate for the toothlessness of the horror.

Every moment is as cringe-worthy and creative as Eugene’s floating toupee. Movies about the millennial moment are multitudinous, but Wobble Palace is special: a sendup of broke-artist types that shimmers with abashed affection.

Vacant in emotion and in cinematic perspective, the movie looks back 15 years but struggles to make an impression longer than 15 minutes.

Thanks to its lovable subjects, Science Fair nails the presentation, but its research is only surface deep.

In stylish and entertaining fashion, Five Fingers for Marseilles looks over the South African countryside and finds fresh vistas for the western genre.