Deception should have been prime, loopy material for Desplechin, but instead remains frustratingly staid, only occasionally capturing the spark of his more personal material. A…
Firestarter can’t recover from its weak script and insipid direction, meandering its way through a tension-free film populated by shallow, uninteresting characters. Fresh off his…
Fivio Foreign “I’m fightin’ my demons while fuckin’ this demon,” Fivio Foreign claims on the Kanye West tribute track “Through the Fire” (the song even…
In a 2006 article for the online magazine Senses of Cinema titled “Mapping Catalonia in 1967: The Barcelona School in Global Context,” Rosalind Galt attempts…
Senior Year is an inconsistent, scattershot vanity project for Rebel Wilson, tanking every potentially interesting angle in favor of lame mugging. Austin Powers meets Never…
Top Gun: Maverick is the ultimate legacy sequel, and a thrilling ode to the fading era of true action movie stars. Slotting squarely into the…
In Front of Your Face is a spiritual awakening of a film, tweaking Hong’s particular tenor from the past decade into something even more penetrating…
On the Count of Three can be uneven and frequently toes the line of twee, but ultimately settles into the right mix of broad comedy…
Montana Story is a notably tender film, patient both in its flaying of old wounds and in sewing seeds of healing. Scott McGehee and David…
Pleasure isn’t the first film to attack the intersection of capitalism, misogyny, and exploitation endemic to the porn industry, but it does so with style…
The Innocents thankfully forgoes any social commentary in favor of impressive horror atmosphere and a study of childhood’s central paradox. When the director of an…
Operation Mincemeat is precisely the kind of stolid history flick your dad will probably like but which bears little artistry to otherwise meaningfully distinguish itself.…
Monstrous is the latest metaphor-heavy Babadook knockoff that viewers could do without. Imagine, for one brief moment, if the man behind the infamous 2007 Lindsay…
Lake Forest Park The official synopsis for Kersti Jan Werdal’s Lake Forest Park reads that “a group of teenagers have to come to terms with the…
I read the original Dell Abyss paperback of Kathe Koja’s classic debut novel The Cipher in my early twenties. Koja’s voice immediately reignited my excitement…
The Twin is a thoughtless, derivative bit of horror pap that feels like it was written by a bot. Utterly generic in every conceivable way,…
This Much I Know to Be True is a flowing, amorphous music-doc experience, both capturing and emulating the particularity of Nick Cave’s late-career art. The…
Il buco is a rich, poetic film that seeks to articulate man’s existence both within and in tension with nature. Through a constant fusion of…
The Sadness delivers cartoonishly gory entertainment, but is less successful in delivering the Romero tradition of meaningful societal indictments. Canadian director Rob Jabbaz shot The…
Answering the Sun We’ve all been told not to look at the sun before. We’ll go blind, they said; they told us in explicit detail…