Rock, Paper and Scissors starts off beguilingly odd, but fails to ever realize its genre potency and soon falls into wheel-spinning. There’s something very wrong with Maria Jose (Valeria Giorcelli) and her younger brother Jesus (Pablo Sigal). Living a hermetic existence in the dilapidated…
The Man with the Answers aims for restraint but instead fails to either properly probe or articulate its characters. A well-meaning and tentative entrant into the realm of slow-burn road trip romances, Stelios Kammitsis’ The Man with the Answers is perhaps most noteworthy for…
Long Story Short is occasionally pretty to look at but otherwise gruelingly repetitive and dull. From the guy that played Kano in this year’s Mortal Kombat reboot comes Long Story Short, an Australian romantic comedy that basically takes the third act of Adam Sandler’s…
Unlike its subjects, Rebel Hearts is too conventional and not daring enough. Uplifting and unashamedly radical, Rebel Hearts, the sophomore effort from Pedro Kos, traces the history of the shockingly progressive Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary from their start as a rebellious…
Snake Eyes is all boring backstory and cliched tropes, and not remotely as weird as the material demands. Apparently, it’s absurdly hard to make a good movie out of a beloved ’80s cartoon that was essentially a glorified toy commercial for children. Although there…
Kandisha doesn’t quite rise to the directors’ past heights, but remains both riveting and probing in its own right. With horror, thriller, and the many mash-ups of the two proliferating under the dreaded confines of pandemic filmgoing (hunkered down, for most, with oneself or…
Stuntman is a more modest effort than similar docu-efforts, but greatly benefits from Braun’s sincerity and likability. On September 8, 1974, with a ton of hype and media fanfare, daredevil Evel Knievel tried — and spectacularly failed — to jump the mile-wide Snake River…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words,…
Old suffers a bit from Shyamalan’s weaknesses as a writer, but by its end, ranks as one of the director’s weirdest and most poignant works yet. If there’s a single unifying force behind the films of M. Night Shyamalan, it’s their outright insistence upon requiring…
Despite clearly belonging to a lineage of oddball, lo-fi comedy, A Dim Valley still marks itself as a unique contribution. Shot through a gauzy haze, at once evoking a sense of nostalgia while also displacing the film from any specific time period, Brandon Colvin’s…
