Body Brokers is littered with fascinating parts, but never manages to pull it all together into a cohesive vision. There are at least four different movies vying for attention in the new ripped-from-the-headlines thriller Body Brokers, each of them potentially compelling on their own, but…
I Blame Society is a cutting antihero showcase for director-star Gillian Wallace Horvat. Wickedly funny and sharp enough to draw blood, I Blame Society is the feature debut from writer-director Gillian Wallace Horvat, who also stars as a warped version of herself. The semi-autobiographical film…
Young Hearts is a sweet but ultimately very slight bit of decade-late lite-mumblecore cinema. Sarah and Zachary Ray Sherman‘s young love story Young Hearts (formerly titled Thunderbolt in Mine Eye) plays like intro-level mumblecore for tweens — so it should come as no surprise that Mark and Jay Duplass…
Sacrifice is overly familiar, Lovecraftian knockoff material that’s a slog to get through even at a short 88 minutes. The legacy of H.P. Lovecraft looms large over the horror genre, so much so that even works with no stated connection to the old master can’t…
The Sinners is bad enough one wishes it veered into absurdist fun. It doesn’t. As far as horror films go, there are a number of avenues to success, and thus, also plenty of room for forgiveness. Inane premise? I’ll bite. Annoying characters? Easy — just…
The World to Come is a narratively austere but emotionally and sociologically potent study of women and love under patriarchy. Set on the frigid expanse of the mid-nineteenth century amid material poverty and emotional scarcity, The World to Come finds, in its title, a feeling…
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,…
JUMBO manages to imbue its tricky material with sensitivity but at the expensive of teasing out much of its considerable potential. It’s not often that object sexuality (or, OS for the sake of brevity) is discussed outside the confines of lurid reality television, and as…
Blithe Spirit‘s attempts at screwball comedy land with a dull, well-costumed thud. Mounting another film adaptation of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit isn’t a heretical act; the work itself was always considered minor Coward, and the 1945 film version was met with moderate fanfare and…
The Swordsman is hamstrung by weak direction that has no idea how to shoot its otherwise well-choreographed action set pieces. The disgraced and retired warrior at the center of Choi Jae-hoon’s The Swordsman is a cipher. Given the slightest bit of backstory and played by…
