Siddhant Adlakha

For one thing, The Beloved traces its central dynamic through an entire production. For another, it trades less in frigid restraint and more in suffocating closeups, which capture nuanced performances that prove deeply affecting, even if the movie around them doesn’t fully cohere.

Eisenberg is an actor and playwright, so he writes what he knows, but The Debut is also one of the most self-assuredly cinematic comedies to come out of Hollywood in quite some time.

Yeon is usually a master of nestling character drama between sci-fi concepts, but he falters here by refusing to engage with his story’s emotional Catch-22s. Instead, he presents his notions plainly, so much that even his tale of a mother’s grief ends up swept aside, in favor of a more lurid procedural that barely gels with the film at hand. Worse yet, it wraps up neatly before it truly has the chance to get going, leaving audiences with nothing to ponder, whether about loss, mortality, or our evolving digital world.

By the time the credits roll, it’s hard not to feel inspired by the noble battle at hand, by the handful of aged leaders who have been fighting for years, and by the industry-wide solidarity forced to emerge from beneath obfuscating forces seeking to divide and conquer. The politics of Union Town are appropriately personal — in that they’re about real people, in the most meaningful ways.

That Barats crafts a self-reflexive, semi-autobiographical character this flawed and callow makes for a remarkable starting point, but despite the film’s many winding tributaries, it never reaches a sufficiently smart, funny or enlightening destination, remaining ironically unmoored until the end.

It’s as rich, observant and absorbing as any great book about identity, imbued with a lush cinematic splendor that makes every moment last a lifetime.

Despite its mere 92-minute runtime, its shadowy, eye-catching tableaus extend for lengthy stretches without conjuring much meaning — or at least, without meaning appropriate to its characters’ sprawling, novelistic dialogue. These result in some stellar performances, but they end up in service of a tale whose inflexible form is so paramount to its telling as to be self-defeating, rather than self-reflexive.

Its stop-start approach sees numerous characters and subplots introduced before existing ones can be resolved, or even commenced in earnest, yielding a paradoxically overstuffed sequel where little of note occurs.

Despite trying to frame beauty and brutality side by side, it’s rife with the kind of ugliness it isn’t ready to confront, rooted in dimensionless characters who are too similarly stoic to make for a meaningful or engaging journey.

Woman Unknown is a harrowing film in which morality and physicality become uncannily entwined, a dynamic el-Toukhy and cinematographer Jasper Spanning gradually explore through visual transformations.