Teo Bugbee

The images are artfully crafted, but the narrative lacks momentum. The film flirts with themes of surveillance and immigrant anxieties, but its allegoric ambitions are continually thwarted by yet another neighborly grievance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The repetition of verbal and visual storytelling points to the limited scope of this film. A Cops and Robbers Story explores Pegues’s split loyalties, but the talking head interviews tend to isolate characters whose very intimacy is the subject of the film.

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.

The film is invested in accurately depicting the details of its character’s lives, but its collection of studied impressions doesn’t coalesce into a coherent final portrait.

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

Fiennes brings the fire, yet the air around him remains unmoved, even by his embers.

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.

Thematically shallow but stylistically rich, Thirst Street is best enjoyed with a hint of its heroine’s willfully superficial vision.

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

Sonia is a powerful subject, but Big Sonia brings little perspective to her story.

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

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.

If Show Dogs sometimes betrays its shaggy charms, there is comfort in remembering that many movies are much dumber than this one, and so few of them have either the good taste or the good manners to compensate with puppies.

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.