Benedetta is as bawdy as any Verhoeven on paper, but the director’s uncharacteristically meek directorial approach renders the film far tamer than it should be.…
Silent Night is more holiday punishment than gift. Featuring a floor-to-ceiling stacked cast and a festive setting and title, one might assume that Silent Night, the…
Try Harder! submits itself to a certain festival-friendly documentary texture rather than acting as a probing reflection of its sociopolitical environment. One of the many tensions…
Encanto can be a bit boring, a bit shallow, and a bit underwhelming in the musical department, but its gorgeous animation and rather quaint character make…
The Summit of the Gods proves that the new subgenre of mountaineering movies can successfully and beautifully extend to the world of animation. The rapidly…
Bruised is a dumb, derivative riff on Rocky, yet another work of deglamorization that fails to scrape beyond its grimy surface. It seems only appropriate that a…
There’s a potentially great movie buried in Encounter, one that Pearce scuttles in service of a high concept that goes mostly nowhere. Riz Ahmed has…
Meek Mill Meek Mill owes his entire career to fortunate circumstances: as in, he regularly talks a big game online about how he’s one of…
A Castle for Christmas is the latest Netflix attempt to ape the Hallmark holiday game, but you’d be better off with a lump of coal. Director Mary Lambert…
Potentially useful as pedagogical sledgehammer, Burning unfortunately isn’t much of an aesthetic object. Vividly illustrating Australia’s devastating “Black Summer” wildfires, which raged off and on from June…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or…
Boiling Point resists the temptation toward food porn aestheticizing and instead builds a tightly-wound thriller from the anxiety of a working-class existence. Perhaps more so than…
Cusp is a frequently gorgeous doc that lights on some fascinating presentational modes and psychological insights, but which stumbles in last-minute bid for palliative punctuation. The…
Procession Certain films allow cinema to display its unbridled capacity for humanity. Certain films can truly change lives, as hyperbolic as that may sound. Robert…
Drive My Car is the latest proof that Ryusuke Hamaguchi is thinking much bigger than most of his contemporaries. Ryusuke Hamaguchi has fast become one of…
Procession is a work of communal catharsis, applying Greene’s particular documentarian inclinations to emotionally potent ends. Certain films allow cinema to display its unbridled capacity for…
The First Wave isn’t much more than an ornamental object, pointlessly self-assured in its distasteful aesthetic manipulations. The compartmentalization that contemporary documentary tends to engender —…
House of Gucci is relentlessly entertaining spectacle, utterly soapy and only occasionally undermined by some bland prestige film sheen. Ridley Scott goes two-for-two this year, first…
Young Thug What does one expect from Young Thug in 2021? Since his arrival onto the contemporary hip-hop landscape nearly a decade ago, he’s managed…
The Strings is pure vibe-y lite-horror, director Ryan Glover skilled at eerie mood-setting and constructing effective compositions and ambiance. Ryan Glover’s new film The Strings is almost…