Jacob Oller

Even the third-act pivot, which pushes Unidentified further into campy, confused daytime TV territory, can’t rouse an audience nodding off after a stakeless, thrill-free whodunnit. But it does help undermine whatever social message al-Mansour might’ve offered about the way women live and die in modern Saudi Arabia, without even tapping into the joyous tastelessness of some of its peers.

This is lizard-brain ass-kicking, done about as well as you could hope, with a variety of martial art styles, ridiculous weaponry, and oddball characters for flavor.

Mumenthaler accesses both sides of Lina’s uncanny dissociation, the lonesome and the sublime. It’s a captivating assessment of a hypersensitive mental state, nonjudgmental yet clear-eyed about the power it holds over its subject. But what allows The Currents to sweep you away is its understanding of impermanence.

It’s a slow drip towards the end, reality running out like blood from a vein, leaving only a body of stories behind. But without a compelling narrative or affecting emotions at its core, the subversion is often as shallow as the legend.

Savage House is caught, then, in a conundrum like that posing its characters: It’s too respectable to entirely ignore, yet too obvious and coarse to entertain those whose attention it courts.

Dosa’s film—which she wrote alongside Magnason, Jocelyne Chaput, and Erin Casper—sometimes strains a bit too visibly to connect this theme, becoming so enraptured with the encapsulating power of ice that the film protests too much about its own profundity.

It’s suburban strip mall horror, which Parsons demystifies over the course of his overwrought directorial debut.

The ensuing shenanigans parade a cast of slumming heavy-hitters (Fiona Shaw, Charles Dance) going through the motions of ancient “battle of the sexes” jokes.

When in doubt, screenwriters Zachary Donohue and T.W. Burgess so awkwardly rush back to genre conventions that it feels like Passenger failing a series of trust falls before our eyes.

I Love Boosters paints another winning amusement park ride in the bright colors of its filmmaker’s politics.