Teo Bugbee

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.