Aesthetic flourishes abound, which make it an entertaining viewing experience, but one does wish that the narrative was a touch more complex. Lelio embeds some compelling meta-textual moments — ones that mostly address that fact that he’s a man tackling this subject — but the actual story of Julia can feel secondary to the melodic pageantry.

It’s all very atmospheric, including the frequent bloodlettings that Sister Brigid applies to Robin’s arm (the camera lingers lovingly on every spilled drop). But the dour, humorless proceedings never achieve the profundity they’re aiming for, and the revisionist take on Robin doesn’t prove very interesting or revelatory.

An overly mannered affect undermines the rawness of the emotions, keeping them from landing with the impact they ought.

While not every grown-up romance needs to be sexually explicit, this stiff restraint sits at odds with a script that often seems to be reaching for Apatovian raunch.

Masters of the Universe touches all the fan-serving bases, with a fun cameo by a certain star of a previous film incarnation and enough post-credit sequences to guarantee several sequels. But it all comes off as terribly forced, as if everyone involved was already trying to figure out exactly how much they’ll earn signing autographs at future Comic-Cons.

If the film captures something of the concept’s intriguing unease — with 20-year-old director Kane Parsons drawing from his own Backrooms-set short films, created when he was just a teenager — its underbaked storytelling made me wonder if some spooky ideas might be better left as whispers in the dark.

This is the sort of generic “things that go bump in the night” chiller that seems more suited for late-night cable than theatrical release, especially in an era when superior efforts have lifted the horror genre to a higher level.

At times, the movie veers almost into spoof territory, but it never commits to the bit enough to be anything more than a mismatched genre hybrid, despite its atmospheric visuals and strong design elements.

Barnard has always coaxed layered, thoughtful performances from her cast and knows this kind of battered but unbowed community like the back of her hand. But the drama here feels too diagrammatic, foretelling a tragic fate from the first scene onward as everyone parties down like their lives depend on it.

A pileup of movie-ish improbabilities in the climactic act notwithsanding, the new film is a taut nail-biter with a strong cast.

Jim Queen is a crass, profane, giddily stupid romp through a heap of stereotypes about gay life in Paris. It’s teeming with jokes about prostate orgasms, about tops and bottoms, about fetishes and bodily fluids and G’d out party bois. It comes as a welcome shock to the system here at this august, black-tie film festival. I just wish the movie was funnier and fresher than it is.

Based on a well-regarded novel by Brenda Navarro, it’s a wafty character study so stripped down and elliptical that it lacks the connective tissue to hook us into its story or provide emotional access to its characters.

The film moves swiftly enough, with the gags coming at such a consistent pace, that inevitably some of them land. And the performers certainly know how to sell the material, with Cohen amusingly leaning into his character’s humiliations, Pike appealingly reveling in her character’s dominance, and the top-notch supporting cast going through their paces like the pros they are.

This not-quite-a-feature is basically harmless, a wallow in nostalgia so innocuous that it’s hard to begrudge its aviation-crazed creator with connections sufficient to indulge his whim.

It’s a handsomely mounted film, full of precise period detail, but is otherwise undistinguished from many solemn, exacting biopics that have come before it.

More chronicle than drama, it sticks faithfully by the side of its lovable mess of a heroine, whom Exarchopoulos plays with her usual no-bullshit funkiness, this time with too many glasses of wine down the hatch. She brings a dose of humor and a few grace notes to a movie in search of a tighter story, even if it deserves credit for its honesty.

Even if its elements don’t always gel, The Beloved offers another prime showcase for Sorogoyen’s art of unease, as well as for Bardem’s talent for playing men who can fly off the handle at any moment.

The Japanese director has no shortage of ideas — chief among them the potential for advanced robotics to bring closure to the bereaved. But too few of those ideas yield satisfying conclusions, resulting in a drama that becomes treacly and insubstantial, reaching for a profundity that remains elusive.

The problem is that all the various strands — the parallel tales — dilute our access to the characters, limiting their dimensions.

If nothing else, Guy Ritchie’s latest effort proves that a movie can be ridiculously convoluted and simple-minded at the same time.

Sometimes eloquent and often rocky, Magic Hour is good enough to make you wish it was much less predictable.

Balagov is indisputably a filmmaker with his own distinctive vision, ideally matched with Evgueni and Sacha Galperine’s glowering score and with Fray’s nimble shooting style, which often takes its cue to get in close from the knotted bodies on the wrestling mats. Story-wise, however, Butterfly Jam is too diffuse to measure up to the brutally transfixing Beanpole.

The actors are all likeable enough, especially the gamine Demoustier, but they are stuck with limp material that’s more twee than captivating.

Nobu is a straightforward and admiring portrait of its subject.

The film has its rewards, mostly of the unsophisticated kind, since the fight sequences come fast and furious and the cheesy dialogue has enough groan-worthy one-liners to inspire a thousand drinking games.

That exciting crash sequence — from initial turbulence through to catastrophic Pacific Ocean landing — is where high-stakes action specialist Harlin is most firmly in his sweet spot.

David Frankel’s sequel hits familiar beats that fans will eat up and deftly reconfigures the core trio of women into new adversarial positions, even if it ultimately lapses into cozy sentimentality. The movie is best when it sticks to fluffy, fun nostalgia rather than shooting for substance.

While it’s not without entertainment value, Motor City feels like it wants to be Don Siegel meets Michael Mann meets Walter Hill with a dash of John Woo, but ends up an ersatz version of all their work.