Teo Bugbee

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

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.

Where many coming-of-age films build their stories around the discovery of a fixed selfhood, “Giant Little Ones” succeeds when it chooses to treat youthful identity as open to shift with accumulated experience.

As is perhaps appropriate, given the comic occupations of the Reynolds (and the Elliott) family, this unusual, unsettling and terrific little film presents itself not as a domestic opera, but as a family comedy.

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.

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.

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

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

This is a passion project in the best sense of the word, a movie in which the ingenuity and dedication of the filmmakers illuminate the same qualities in their subjects.

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.

It falls on the performances to add subtle touches to the narrative’s broad strokes. George is admirably warm as the earthbound Hazel, and Dorff suggests the selfishness of his character’s selfless desperation.

White and Monroe demonstrate natural chemistry, and they discretely suggest the private experiences of their characters, the youthful doubts that can’t be extinguished by passion. In unpretentious fashion, After Everything portrays the bittersweetness of a first love that blooms in crisis.

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.

Every moment is as cringe-worthy and creative as Eugene’s floating toupee. Movies about the millennial moment are multitudinous, but Wobble Palace is special: a sendup of broke-artist types that shimmers with abashed affection.

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

Thanks to its lovable subjects, Science Fair nails the presentation, but its research is only surface deep.

In stylish and entertaining fashion, Five Fingers for Marseilles looks over the South African countryside and finds fresh vistas for the western genre.

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

In absence of either good humor or good set pieces, Blue Iguana is a heist gone bust.

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.

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.

Milla is a major achievement, a film that is at once as delicate as it is strong, a fitting testament to motherhood, to survival.

The actress Jordana Spiro directed Night Comes On and wrote the script with Angelica Nwandu, a spoken-word poet and creator of the incisive gossip website The Shade Room. Ms. Nwandu is also a former client of the foster care system. The result of their partnership is a film that balances penetrating clarity with compassion.

In a resolute acknowledgment of the oppression that too many young women face at home, the film portrays the family structure as the enforcing unit of feminine docility. Here, love is another form of bondage.

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.

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.

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