Beasts Clawing at Straws The new Korean crime thriller Beasts Clawing at Straws is a derivative, charmless bit of Tarantino-aping nonsense, a convoluted mess so…
Mulan fails as action spectacle and lazily cribs from the vast cinematic legacy it so loosely approximates. After such massive financial successes as Beauty and the…
Swanberg’s latest represents a savvy and mature return to his early-career mode of filmmaking. Fifteen years after his first feature, Joe Swanberg is back where…
Modern-day Cuba, as documented in Hubert Sauper’s latest foray into political ethnography, is a third-world island marked distinctly by the stamp of first-world capitalism. Co-existing…
Undergods is a crypto-anthology film that gradually morphs into a distaff network narrative, one of those everyone-is-connected type movies that were all the rage about…
With Sanzaru, writer/director Xia Magnus details both the grueling daily trials of elder care and the immigrant experience with the patient, observant eye of a…
The works of Lloyd Kaufman, founder and director of Troma Films, have always been about breaking the boundaries of what can be shown and told in…
Undergods Undergods is a crypto-anthology film that gradually morphs into a distaff network narrative, one of those everyone-is-connected type movies that were all the rage…
For all of Tenet’s ostensible narrative novelty and talk of the future, it is, in the end, a dismayingly familiar experience. It makes some degree…
Coastal Elites is a tone-deaf and formally lazy film that ignores issues of substance in favor of a facile call for civility. Anyone concerned that the…
Nomad is a passionate and heartfelt work, but Herzog’s foregrounded presence sometimes distracts from film’s more mystical ambitions. In January 1989, the legendary British adventurer, writer,…
Iannucci’s latest isn’t quite a natural fit for the director, but he still mostly succeeds by injecting his trademark levity into the spirited core of…
In its first half, Liao Ming-yi’s debut feature, I WeirDo, fits the mode of the cute, quirky rom-com. It bears down hard on its appropriately…
The Dark & the Wicked It’s unfortunate that Bryan Bertino’s debut feature was 2008’s The Strangers. The film is the 21st century’s best instance of…
Wonders in the Suburbans is an unwieldy affair, taking supposedly comedic pot-shots at any number of targets without any clear vision. Jeanne Balibar’s brand of idiosyncrasy…
Dolan’s latest intrigues in deviating from the director’s familiar mode, but its busyness never fully distills into any cogent statement. Matthias & Maxime, the 2019…
Face the Music doesn’t possess the rambunctious energy of its predecessors, but is hopeful and good-natured in a way too few comedies achieve these days. Just…
The low-stakes Get Duked! thankfully proves to be a more spirited and memorable comedy than its godawful title suggests. It has to be said: Get…
Writer-director Sidharth Srinivasan’s Kriya intelligently inhabits two familiar horror setups: first, the unease of a mysterious seduction; and second, the narrative of the hapless outsider…
The Reckoning On its face, The Reckoning seems like a strange follow-up for director Neil Marshall, after last year’s mid-budget Hellboy reset. Then again, given…
I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a masterful and surprising adaptation from Charlie Kaufman, a work of towering humanism braced by an exquisitely disorienting aesthetic.…