Teo Bugbee

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.