Red Dot’s survivalist vision isn’t consistently executed, but there’s enough here to suggest Darborg is worth watching. There’s something appealingly primal about stranding movie characters…
Jazmine Sullivan Jazmine Sullivan has built a rather remarkable career for herself over the last decade, the sort that few contemporary pop artists are allowed…
Music is a generic, offensive slog that co-opts ASD in service of bland musical pomp and an imbalanced plot. Pop songstress Sia titling her directorial debut…
Dear Comrades! is a nuanced reckoning with Stalinist legacy and the lingering brutality left in his wake. Offering a solemn look at Soviet society in the…
Judas and the Black Messiah energizes necessary rhetoric and is impeccably crafted, but diminishes its power by sticking so closely to a prescribed biopic template. The…
Barb and Star plays to Wiig’s most overindulgent and weirdo instincts, failing to strike the balance of her best comedic work. The career path forged by…
The Map of Tiny Perfect Things is yet another time loop flick that fails to do anything to energize its exhausted conceit. Note to Hollywood: No…
Of Stan Brakhage’s ephemeral Desert, Fred Camper once wrote that “large and small, and inner and outer, worlds dance about each other in a kind…
French Exit is an absolute disaster. The end. It takes truly talented people both in front of and behind the camera to make something as abysmal…
Land works best as a swooning mood piece, but lacks in thematic complexity and is too familiar by half. In Land — one of the two…
Black Medusa In a thankless role as one of the most morose femmes fatales in memory, Nour Hajri plays Nada, a (mostly) mute office worker…
The myth of Orpheus seems to tell us that in the face of overwhelming grief, the hardest thing to do is have faith that things…
A bizarre parable that doubles as a kind of fractured fairy tale, The North Wind is a grab bag of vaguely surrealist tropes surrounding a…
Within French cinema, it’s not hard to discern a tradition of films that revolve around groups of youngsters who spend their leisure summertime in Gallic…
Red Post on Escher Street is a powerful, insurrectionary refutation of the larger culture’s nihilistic star-gazing and obliteration of art. Red Post on Escher Street, the…
Space Sweepers boasts of welcome vein of social commentary but is hampered by endless plot convolutions and a pivot into cheap platitudes. Man first walked on…
Bipolar The myth of Orpheus seems to tell us that in the face of overwhelming grief, the hardest thing to do is have faith that…
Lapsis mines much of its dystopic power through appropriately small-scale world-building and clear-eyed rhetoric. Noah Hutton’s Lapsis is a genuine curiosity, a micro-budget sci-fi feature that…
Crazy Samurai: 400 vs. 1 is a one-man spectacle that is hampered by repetitive filmmaking technique and some sloppy editing. Expectations for Crazy Samurai 400 vs.…
PVT CHAT hints at sapient commentary of our transactional internet age, but the gesture ultimately proves empty. Writer-director Ben Hozie’s latest, PVT CHAT, is another film…
Of all the different horror sub-genres, the zombie flick is perhaps the one with the most innate spectacle. With a few obvious exceptions — low-budget…