It wants to be the crowd-pleasing, audience-nudging, Easter-Egg-having ode to the toy line that Mattel clearly desires, while also avoiding accusations of taking the whole thing too seriously. In so doing, it’s a film that tries to serve two masters, and doesn’t have the power to really honor either.

These sorts of movies do more damage to the culture than any bloody horror flick you can name, because they make the unforgivable adorable.

With its effective visual language and strongly directed performances, “Backrooms” is more promising than anything else, a sign of what could be built within this subgenre and what its creator could make in the future.

Throughout “Renoir,” a film of morbid whimsy by director Chie Hayakawa, Fuki’s imagination fabricates moments that, in context, are fantastical but, at face value, appear relatively grounded. It’s magical realism that feels more plausible than otherworldly, which makes for a disorienting experience.

Tight and taut, “Forastera” is a major discovery, handling grief with alluring stylistic choices that enhance the already remarkable narrative. If ghosts exist, Aleñar Iglesias has learned the cinematic sorcery to house them. It’s a luminous, spellbinding movie.

Time and Water is very much a project trying to capture memory, time, and history, even as it melts before your eyes.

Mumenthaler’s oblique off-center approach makes “Currents” a strangely mesmerizing work, and up until almost the very end, its mysteries remain intact.

Not only is it one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time, but its every barb, every declaration, every insult changes dramatically once you and its characters know everything they fought and failed to conceal. It’s a film that changes every time you, the viewer, lose the chance to be fully present for someone you love.

While this undercurrent of death courses through the whole film, by contrasting it with scenes like the one described above, Aljafari crafts a film about resilience and about love. A film that centers on community and family, finding strength in this communion despite all the horrors that must be endured.

This is a serious film in the best sense of the term, a thoughtful film about people facing the direst problems with honor, intelligence, and courage that goes beyond the physical to include fearlessness about pursuing the truth.

Maybe back in the ‘80s this premise would have seemed fresh; at this point, it’s practically reactionary.

Corporate Retreat might be the worst movie of the year, not because it’s unpleasant, cliched, and gory, too, but because its filmmakers seem to have as little regard for their audience as they do for their craft.

There’s enough death and dismay to make that question surprising, but Victorian Psycho often feels too much like a comedy, one of those movies that nudge-nudges you with a “can you believe this” tone to the filmmaking without giving us enough to believe in.

A sharp, engaging thriller with a novel premise, “Tuner” puts the viewer into a world where to hear is to feel excruciating pain.

Saccharine proves that in a great horror movie, fear and helplessness work hand in hand. And James is expertly in control of it all.

Stolen Kingdom still sits comfortably alongside other very capable docs about the kind of vaguely criminal youth countercultures that spun off in the 21st century, intended to stick it to the man: “Secret Mall Apartment” and the upcoming “Santacon.”

Passenger is a fairly solid bit of genre craftwork that is a lot more impressive than its desultory release might suggest.

Instead of assessing, it observes and assumes the audience is as enraptured with the subject’s insouciance as the filmmakers are.

During the course of the film, which is directed by Andrew Bernstein in a visually unmemorable, by-the-book manner characteristic of many big-budget action shows, Greer muses on the line separating civilization from savagery and where he stands in relation to it.

In a sense, this is Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Throne of Blood,” one of the other Kurosawa’s unequivocal masterpieces, and it earns that comparison in every way.

Mungiu keeps Fjord riveting by letting it unfold as a moral and social quandary more than a mystery.

There’s no reason for anything in this movie except the wish to make even more money.

Say what you will about Refn’s worst work, he often felt like a visionary instead of a replicator. Maybe Hell is discovering that there’s nothing new to say.

It’s bold, provocative, and assured filmmaking that oscillates between moments of breathtaking cinematic prowess and satirical characterizations, whose coy rendering turns a mirror toward those who unconsciously lap up hollow action heroes when the far more intriguing story exists in plain sight.

A meta reading of “Propeller” is more interesting than the film itself, which is tragically hampered by a distinct lack of ambition and performances that never quite find the right tone. It’s a gift that Travolta made for himself and his family, something he likely wanted to leave as a part of his legacy. That doesn’t make it a good movie.

Interestingly, “Is God Is” is centered on the complexity of Black women, but one of the main motifs is rooted in the consequences of a Black man’s oversaturated masculinity, specifically in how he leaves scars long after he moves on.

Forge isn’t perfect, and some of the storylines don’t stick the landing, but Ng has created a space where all of these ideas are at play simultaneously, where we see characters we haven’t seen before, operating in new and surprising contexts.

Though the surrealism and playfulness of the short film have been streamlined for a narrative feature, “Decorado” still feels like a fully fleshed-out, focused work in its own right.