Llosa does her best to capture the delirium of the source material, but Fever Dream can’t quite sustain its dizzying, eerie tenor. Claudia Llosa’s Fever Dream is a film that certainly seeks to live up to its title, building from its eerie source material an delirious,…
Dear Evan Hansen is a manipulative, unintentionally awkward musical plagued by a black hole of a lead character. Dear Evan Hansen makes a pretty strong case for the second biggest recent Broadway smash in the Hamilton world we all live in — yes, still…
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…
Dating abd New York offers sporadic pleasures, but can’t shake loose its obvious cribbing of familiar cinematic influences. Dating and New York, Jonah Feingold’s feature debut after working in shorts and television for the past decade, is a film built from the scraps of…
Anne at 13,000 Ft. keeps its familiar portrait of an unraveling psyche fresh through its viscerality and opaque characterization. Anne at 13,000 Ft. only occasionally utilizes medium shots, and nothing wide, so committed is it to staying close to its titular subject, to actualizing the…
Wild Indian suggests a possible fascinating study that it doesn’t follow through on, but it does add enough wrinkles and character nuance to remain mostly compelling. Wild Indian begins with an epigraph that reads as parable: “Some time ago…There was an Ojibwe man who got…
In a bleak, post-Trump reality wherein nationalist hogwash has pervaded casual discourse, Yû Irie’s Ninja Girl reflects the kind of right-minded rhetoric that the world could do with more of. It also, unfortunately, realizes the kind of facile, lightweight logic all such binary idiocy…
The Last Thing Mary Saw isn’t exactly a bad film per se, but it is exactly what horror cinema doesn’t need right now. Yet another somber, religion-inflected exercise in moody period “horror,” Edoardo Vitaletti’s debut feature plays like a dour inversion of Fear Street…
In the Same Breath boasts plenty of charged imagery and emotion, but its pat dialectics and dangling theses undermine its intellectual power. For a while, Nanfu Wang’s In the Same Breath makes for a fascinating companion piece to Ai Weiwei’s 2020 documentary CoroNation. Neither…
Vivo starts strong under Lin-Manuel’s distinctive brand, but veers into the realm of recycle in its disappointing back half. Few performers are more divisive in our present pop culture landscape than Lin-Manuel Miranda. This likely has to do with the line he toes between clever…
