Teo Bugbee

The softness lacks detail, the butterfly metaphors lack originality, but the movie is pleasant, a balmy introduction to adult feelings of desire and belonging.

Like other fixtures of the Y.A. genre, Fallen is filmed with a professional sheen that sacrifices emotional sincerity for high production values.

It’s a relaxed film, one that allows the audience to sit back and, if not smell the roses, then at least appreciate them.

The film’s ironic tone largely defangs the transgressive films it parodies, but Kramer does broaden the scope of the queer leather canon.

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.

It’s hard to enjoy the action when you witness its emotional cost, but once Sook-hee starts slashing goons from atop motorcycles, it’s equally impossible to root for the violence to stop.

Lears clearly feels earnest sympathy for her subjects and passion for their cause, but the film often replicates for viewers the same atmosphere of hopelessness that makes climate activism a hard sell for voters.

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

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.

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 soft-focus cinematography is beautiful but drippy, and this general tendency toward mushy melodramatics presents an unflattering contrast to the sharp-lined vivacity that Jansson brought to the page.

The film’s referential pleasures feel insubstantial, diminished by the direct comparison to more meaningful works of the period.

The trouble with this cinematic Trojan horse is that the superficial blandness dominates the frame. It’s hard to feel the story’s stakes when the images are always indicating no danger ahead.

The film’s subjects are overwhelmingly earnest, but the movie suffers for its substitution of enterprise over entertainment.

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

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.

Lu sometimes feels more like a cynical plot device than a character. The problem is only amplified by the animation itself.

Ideal Home is genuinely funny, and the poignant and pithy script is aided by the chemistry between its stars, who are equally adept with comedic punch lines as they are with dramatic gut punches.

The direction, by Preston A. Whitmore II, seems hampered by either a lack of resources or a lack of interest.

It is the movie’s saving grace that its family acting troupe faces the gobbledygook with openhearted silliness and sincerity.

This lived-in quality to the filmmaking supports equally relaxed performances from both veteran and emerging actors, making for an even-keeled and easy viewing experience.

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

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 effect is a movie that resembles nothing so much as the centerpiece of the Malus menu — a hot dog made with elevated ingredients.

A film that feels exploitative, not enlightened.

It’s an earnest film, one that glows with pride at Aboriginal resilience. But the impression it leaves is didactic, a saints and demons fable that meanders to foregone conclusions.

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.

With little more than the superficial psychology of shallow characters to guide the movie’s squeamish images, Like Me irritates, but it proves unable to provoke more than mild gut reactions.

With a sprightly wit and an all-star cast to bring it to life, the movie manages to be a loving parody of theater gossips, postwar London and Christie’s murder mysteries all at once.

This is a canny, compact portrait of teenage insensitivity, all the more riveting for its biting dialogue and funny performances.

Salle’s approach leaves the physical details of Mathieu’s escape foggy. It’s not always clear how long Mathieu spends in hiding, or how he acquires the tools needed to sustain his flight.

Throughout, the writer and director Cordula Kablitz-Post asserts Andreas-Salomé’s commitment to her own independence. But Ms. Kablitz-Post’s focus on Andreas-Salomé’s suitors has the effect of chaining the early feminist’s legacy to exactly the patriarchal conventions she claims to reject.

The ensemble builds believable chemistry as intimate family members, and when their characters deliver their arguments for life or death, the stakes feel appropriately high.

Director Asa Helga Hjorleifsdottir never displays the passion that her characters suggest in their stories. If her film ever diverged from its ubiquitous images of misty mountains or its plodding piano score, perhaps its characters’ incessant mythmaking would convey deeper mysteries, inner worlds that are not visible to the eye.

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

Tragedy Girls might add group texts to its instruments of death alongside marauding table saws and falling barbells, but the movie’s gender stereotypes keep it chained to the past.

Ironically, the film mirrors the callow cinematic dynamics it critiques: It titillates, even as it scolds.

With its gently twanging score, Moss is a film made in a minor key and its pleasures are minor, too. It passes like a lazy afternoon spent gently high. There’s not much this movie wants to accomplish, but it maintains a mood that sets the mind at ease.

The film plays as a series of perfectly enjoyable sketches strung together, an excuse for veteran actors to chew on playful dialogue.

It is endearing in its frankness: a profile of a star after her return from the firmament.

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.

With each new element, Down a Dark Hall reveals itself, with improbable delight, to be genuinely strange — a movie in which viewers can pick their own pleasure, no two spectators having exactly the same experience.

With The Misandrists, Mr. LaBruce announces, here is queer cinema: confrontational, pansexual, gender-fluid, racially inclusive, angry and surprisingly romantic.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

For all the linguistic gymnastics, the film is hamstrung by its directors’ lack of visual imagination.

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.

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

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 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.

Mr. Civeyrac leads Étienne into anxious imitations of the past, and the possibility of making art fueled by the present never materializes.

Its simplicity and lack of cinematic fancy strikes a tone of surprising relief.

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.

Shipka ably handles the responsibility of leading the story, but the director Matt Smukler has a harder time balancing the charming and empathetic ensemble performances with the script’s constantly judgmental tone.

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

Intriguing, but ultimately slight.

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.

The movie’s driving force is its mythic performance scenes, which are choreographed, sung and acted with clear, balletic conviction by the film’s star, Q’orianka Kilcher.

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.

The contest intentionally lacks meaningful rewards, an obvious metaphor for life’s arbitrary stakes. But as cinema, the lack of purpose becomes a test of patience.

These are characters who are frustrated in love, prevented by law and by their own emotional repression from asking for what they want in their relationships. The stately treatment of their plight leads to a film that buckles under the weight of purgatorial disappointment.

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.

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.

The Malloys’ filmmaking never rises to the level of the actors’ nuanced performances. The actors are energized, but the camera enervates.

Both sartorially and cinematically, the seasoned star at the heart of All I Wish deserves a movie with more to offer than knockoff style.

The supporting cast compensates with piquancy in the side dishes, but the main course is a flavorless misfire.

Each line and image feels predetermined, as if Rebane and his characters had already decided this love story was a losing battle. There is loss, but little sense of risk.

Luck offers fresh ideas; its only misfortune is to present its gifts in recycled wrapping.

Its armchair psychology makes for queasy viewing, a conflation of diagnosis and damnation.

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.

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.

The consistency limits the ability of the directors to lean into their own style, leading to a movie that feels narratively scattered and stylistically inhibited.

The movie presents an eye-catching fantasy of a candy-colored Japanese underworld. But the exoticism feels as cheap as a whiff of a green tea and musk cologne called Tokyo wafting over a department store counter. Even Winstead, stoic in her fashionably boyish haircut, looks bored.

For this action film, the director Brian Andrew Mendoza favors a utilitarian style. His color palette leans toward grays, blues and browns. His fight scenes are not flashy, or even particularly memorable, but they are clear, effectively conveying the necessary information about whose fist has connected with whose face.

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.

So B. It aims for an inclusive message. But Mama’s artificiality makes it hard to buy the movie’s themes of acceptance.

What this admirably hands-off film shows is how the feelings of anxiety that have surrounded school shootings have been monetized and translated into demand for consumer products. It is a nightmarish vision — the military industrial complex deployed in the halls where children ought to roam.

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

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

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

For a film about misandrist revolutionaries, Mayday lacks the courage of its convictions — it sets up boogeymen as targets only to shoot them point blank, in broad daylight.

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

In the scenes that break with banality, there is a zing not only of originality, but of daring.

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

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.

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.

The story’s heroine, its dialogue and even its themes of regret and loneliness seem to be swallowed up by the need to maintain an appearance of contemporary cheek.

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.

With tender performances and dubious conclusions, this story is best appreciated as an explanation for why people seek out the false comfort of gendered pseudoscience. But by fitting characters into formulas, The Female Brain fails to observe the flexibility of human experience.

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

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.

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