Birds of Paradise benefits from gorgeous compositions and dreamy direction, but it never quite reaches the heights its artful pirouetting suggests. On paper, Sarah Adina Smith’s Birds of Paradise seems like a film where nothing should really work, one whose premise can promise only an…
Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is a reductive, self-congratulatory musical that deeply cheapens its real-life subject. Everybody’s Talking About Jamie…everybody, that is, except Amazon Studios, who have done little in the way of promoting a film they spent a great deal to acquire from Disney/Fox earlier…
The Starling is merely the latest by-the-numbers “issues” flick in Theodore Melfi’s bland filmography. It seems that director Theodore Melfi has never met a subject where he felt he couldn’t sand off its rough edges and inherent coarseness and turn it into utter pablum, whether…
Cinderella has exactly one idea to distinguish it, and it’s a bad one. 2021’s latest interpretation of the Cinderella fairy tale comes courtesy of Pitch Perfect mastermind Kay Cannon (here directing) and is based on an “original idea” from James Corden. It’s unclear what this…
Kate isn’t doing anything new from an action-narrative perspective, but slick choreography and gleeful violence helps this girlboss brutality go down smoothly. Kate, a female assassin (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) discovers she’s been poisoned and has less than 24 hours to prowl the neon-lit streets…
Martyrs Lane is the latest horror film built around a metaphor for trauma in which boredom and cliche trump any catharsis. There’s a palpable sense of melancholy at the heart of writer/director Ruth Platt’s Martyrs Lane, a ghost story that largely eschews scares in…
Fucking with Nobody is a radical, playful bit of meta-comedy that executes its risky conceit with aplomb. For her sophomore feature, Fucking with Nobody, Finnish director Hannaleena Hauru opts to play an on-screen alter-ego of herself. Hanna is a filmmaker who, after losing a project…
Diaz‘s signature long-takes here work more to push the material into territory of fatalism rather than substantive political observation. Lav Diaz knows violence. The director’s filmography is virtually an exemplar of the temporal nexus of historical and contemporaneous representations of authoritarian exploitation. Lahi, Hayop…
Superhost isn’t heavy on style and runs out of steam too early, but Gracie Gillam’s outlandishly unhinged performance keep things from becoming bland rehash. A companion piece of sorts to last year’s Airbnb slasher-riff The Rental, Brandon Christensen’s Superhost tills familiar anxieties about trusting strangers while navigating…
Yellow Cat is the kind of cribbing-as-mode film that illuminates nothing other than the kinds of movies its director likes. Godard once declared that all you need to make a film is a girl and a gun. With Yellow Cat, Kazakh filmmaker Adilkhan Yerzhanov has…
