Teo Bugbee

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.