Heslov, making her debut, therefore largely does an impressive job balancing the contestants’ deeply disturbing stories...with the near giddiness they express while getting dolled up. It’s infectious.

As alternatingly silly and serious as its mix of wisdom and wallops, and even with that blond bro gumming up the works, “Birth” is nevertheless zippy, B-movie entertainment.

For the millions of true believers out there, however...the film provides a blissfully melancholy roll call of pleasures.

No matter how much directors Eric Warin and Eric Summer (who wrote the story with Laurent Zeitoun) try to distract with dumb comedy — usually involving the annoying Victor — or cartoony action...the relationship between Félicie and Odette is a warm, heart-tugging one.

The new horror-thriller is cheesy, asinine, convoluted and ludicrous. On the plus side, if your eyeballs need a vigorous workout, this will have them rolling nonstop.

Wirkola is more comfortable engaging with gunfire than people.

Chon’s dense, ambitious, and observant film is full of impressive craft and insight.

Marjorie Prime is a contemplative, intimate and poetic chamber piece, superbly told and nimbly acted, with equal parts nuance and empathy.

Liman’s tone, channelled through Cruise gently straining to deconstruct his own iconography, achieves neither real comedy nor actual tension. The movie feels lightweight, even while pointing fingers at the American government’s meddling foreign policy and lies.

What sets it apart from other overpraised festival indies is its tremendously gifted lead.

The writing in The Wound can be conventional and overly explanatory, but this doesn’t matter because the subject is so fresh.

It’s confused about whether it wants to be a ticking-bomb tale of heroics or a complex insider account.

It’s a movie about two people that ends up being about no one at all.

Pilgrimage travels quite far on the momentum provided by a series of reveals. Each shifts the film’s stakes significantly enough that we look forward to the next divulgence as much as the succeeding battle scene. It ultimately stumbles when it reaches for depth, arriving at a hollow conclusion that mistakes cynicism for profundity.

The cast seems game, and perhaps they realize it’s on them to elevate the material, so the scenes between Reynolds and Jackson have some genuine snap to them, even though the dialogue and characterization are barely memorable.

Spicer has a deft touch with his story, and his cast marvelously fleshes out a bunch of people we care about even though, in most cases, we know we probably shouldn’t.

It didn’t take long for this fleet-footed sequel, spry and charming, to win me over.

This is a filmmaker precise in her composition and in her texture, her comedic beats reminiscent of both David Lynch and Issa Rae.

Whose Streets? vitally offers — despite its birth in sorrow and its many war-zone-like stretches — is a tale of alertness and awakening.

In Cretton’s hands, this fact-based tale of an oddball, destitute upbringing rings false. It’s based on a woman’s complicated personal recollections of her traumatic childhood, and yet it feels like a cloying, one-note Hollywood tale, the beastly trauma all tied up with a pretty bow and de-fanged.

This is a movie full of characters you would walk away from at a cocktail party, engaging in the flattest brand of smart banter imaginable.

A minimalist film like Columbus depends almost entirely on the shading of the characters and the depths of the performances. By that metric, it’s a too-delicate creature, tickling and piquing instead of fully thrusting us into the realm of feelings.

On the surface a tense investigative piece with Renner as a regular Sherlock of the snow, it also slips in cogent and damning points about the limitations and dead ends virtually forced on many residents of Native American reservations.

Although the filmmakers return to outsize wackiness too frequently, the film mercifully isn’t one chaotic gag after another.

Between Berry’s committed performance and the film’s brisk cocktail of dread and adrenaline, Kidnap makes for a rousing, if ridiculous, ride.

With fantasy material like this, we need to be made to believe in the inventions and the conceits, and we cannot do that if they are shot and staged in such a truncated and perfunctory way.

The best way to watch Chronically Metropolitan is to think of it as a parody of a particularly pretentious brand of indie romance. Unfortunately, though, director Xavier Manrique and writer Nicholas Schutt (“Blood & Oil”) play it so solemnly straight for their feature debut that it seems unlikely they’re aiming for satire.

The competition in Step isn’t just to hit a stage and win a talent prize, but to beat the odds in life. Start figuring out now how to clap and dab away tears at the same time; it’s that kind of experience.