There is a satisfying, compact completeness to their handling of the storylines of four different young mothers and sufficient grace notes are enabled in each case to stave off the cliches that occasionally threaten to engulf events.

It’s a slight work that is too enamored with its own quirkiness to amount to much of anything at all.

The Mastermind is a study in one man’s selfishness, his compulsion toward crime as a thrill sport, toward daring himself to execute a challenge to shake up his own humdrum day-to-day schtick.

A few structural issues threaten to tip the balance from cinematic melodrama into TV soap as the bad news keeps on coming, but Izadyar’s sustained emotional conviction carries the vision onwards.

While “Succession” was all about delusion, with the Roy children cluelessly thinking the family business needed them while everyone maneuvered around their childish stunts, Mountainhead is all about the cruel intentionality of men who actively choose to burn down our world and just might have the competence to do it.

Is this impressive, boundary-pushing, experimental cinema or an endurance test with no internal logic where the chief pleasure is leaving the theater afterwards? Could it be both?

"Prom Queen” blitzes through familiar pop-comic vignettes, only pausing to make its loathsome characters’ adolescent nightmares just a little bit freakier.

While The History of Sound suffers from some pacing issues and detours that turn up as dead ends, following Lionel’s path as a budding ethnomusicologist collecting songs and sounds to record on cylinders, this is a lovely movie capable of wounding and haunting you.

To no one’s surprise, Reinsve is immaculately attuned to Trier’s energy, and Sentimental Value is carried by the manic frustration she brings to her part, which is as fun as it is freighted with crisis.

Occasionally muddled, mostly convoluted, and yet still broadly entertaining, it’s a shame this glossy and big budget affair (you really can’t fake Egyptian pyramids like these), will only exist as a streaming pick on Apple TV+.

It’s shaggy in places and favors one side of its story above the other, but ultimately makes for a delightful time.

Regardless of some of the screenplay hiccups and deus ex machina plopped from the sky, “Left-Handed Girl” still announces Tsou as a confident directorial talent with a rare exuberance.

It adds up to a fascinating, if often baffling first effort from Johannson and Kamen, one not afraid of big emotional wallops, but not always able to carry them into truly revelatory spaces. It’s a little predictable, a little bizarre, a little funny, and very sad, but it’s also an ambitious swing at what movies can still be.

What makes Eagles of the Republic fascinating is how, even as it leaves the film world behind for more conventional political thriller trappings in its final act, it still ties the action to the struggles Fahmy undergoes as an actor and as a political mouthpiece.

Taking a sturdy, mainstream premise — a big-city careerist reflecting on her life path during a trip back to the holler, in a setup that faintly echoes “Sweet Home Alabama,” among a hundred other rom-coms — and shading it with moral grays, natural light, and a more unvarnished turn from a well-known star, Leave One Day plays uncannily like a Gallic cover of a Sundance movie, gussied up and vaunted onto the international stage.

Despite its eventual willingness to resolve certain ambiguities, “It Was Just an Accident” derives so much of its throat-clenching power from the uncertainties at the heart of its premise.

Ultimately, it’s a case in point for how an impeccably styled arthouse-grindhouse crossover can feel both dense with signifiers to unpack (although lacking more commonly understood kinds of “depth”), but also fleet, frothy and fun.

Hovering around the prosody of “simp” is the word “sub” — Paul is certainly a proud sub, as we gradually understand his content isn’t solely cheery scroll fodder, but that he’s also happily exhibiting his sexual preference as an “out” kink enthusiast, shining visibility on himself and perhaps others like him to come as the 2020’s continue on.

Fuori stands apart as one of the filmmaker’s most vibrant and accessible works so far, able to emphasize the story of a powerful and beautiful older woman — with flecks of a classic melodrama or the “woman’s picture” — beyond the heritage concerns of Sapienza’s role in Italian letters.

The very last scene makes up for a lot of these misgivings: it’s a beautifully bittersweet last beat for the film’s theme of finding camaraderie in the uncertainty of life. For Campillo, it’s one of his greatest scenes as a director. For Cantent, it’s a fitting final statement.

It also never hurts to be anchored by two actors who are totally game and committed to that vision, and willing to go there, chains, gags, assless chaps and all.

Together, Melliti and Herzi find a rare alchemy between actor and director telling someone else’s story, but one that may turn out to be a bit of each other’s own.

Ultimately, Two Prosecutors is like a perfect 50-50 cocktail of dread and dialogue, the vodka being whichever you’d choose, making the inevitable feel capable of deferment, before it strikes more devastatingly than you’d even think.

The heart of this story remains firmly intact, but there’s something about seeing it rendered in live-action that takes away its inherent magic.

Austen fans might balk a bit at how much this one goes off-script into its own territory, but the spirit of Austen runs deep.

Renoir — with its faint traces of sentiment, and complete absence of sentimentality — delicately articulates the girl’s inner child in a way that allows us to feel it expand across the season.

Christian Petzold‘s gossamer latest film, Mirrors No. 3, is as compact as a novella, as ephemeral in its emotion, as delicate in register as one of the Chopin or Ravel pieces that float through it.

The moments when Moll lets the images reveal as much as the dialogue are the ones that linger.