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…
Marmaduke is one of the most scatological films you’re ever likely to see, and so it’s fitting that it turns out to be an epic piece…
It’s hard to believe that a folk group created in one of the most inorganic of ways — that is, covering songs that were already…
The Takedown is inoffensive as a buddy cop comedy, but runs into trouble with its reductive neoliberal political invocations. Louis Leterrier’s The Takedown, a sequel…
Like A Rolling Stone excels in conveying a vivid sense of the flesh-and-blood human behind the venerated byline. Ben Fong-Torres, the celebrated music journalist profiled in…
Happening is a film of intense linearity and physicality, but it leaves one wishing for a film that had perhaps widened its scope for more…
Multiverse of Madness is all endless, torturous exposition buried within soulless CGI spectacle, and an insult to Sam Raimi’s presence. Is it worth it to…
After Noé’s career peak with Climax, Lux Æterna represents a disappointing return to the director’s haphazard stylistic tics and overindulgent edgelord sensibilities. Like fellow provocateurs Lars von…
Human Nature’s looping narrative games don’t always work, but overall the film makes for an effective study of middle-class malaise. There’s not one, but two structural/temporal gambits…
The Apartment with Two Women Post-Dardenne social realism all too often functions as safe-enough filler material for international film fest lineups, but director Kim Se-in…
Reflection lacks the scale of Vasyanovych’s Atlantis, but its brutalist Wes Anderson-esque tenor makes for a difficult yet still hopeful study of war. While Ukrainian writer/director…
Contrary to popular belief — or, at least, contrary to the ongoing narrative at the time — Person Pitch was not Panda Bear’s first solo…
Inbetween Girl manages to avoid the tepid dramatics of so many teen-screen films, but too often succumbs to bouts of preciousness and self-conscious affectation. The problem…
Machine Gun Kelly Remember all those distinguished titles (see also) bestowed upon Machine Gun Kelly the last time he went pop-punk? Welp, it seems like…
The Innocents When the director of an arthouse horror film about supernatural children readily admits he was inspired by his own experiences of first-time parenthood,…