Luzifer A former student of Michael Haneke’s, now operating under the Ulrich Seidl Filmproduktion banner, Peter Brunner seems primed (and positioned) to be Austria’s next…
Habit sounds like fun, should be fun, wants to be fun; it’s more like Hell. Bella Thorne plays a Los Angeles party girl who masquerades as…
Cryptozoo is both technically and thematically potent, but it’s the film’s third act which cements it as an exceptional and surprising animated work. In Cryptozoo,…
There’s a perverse gothic sex comedy located somewhere in Jakob’s Wife, but it’s buried under reams of flat, deadening horror comedy. The work that made Barbara Crampton…
If ever evidence was needed of art criticism’s role as a passing functionary in the workings of cultural amusement and consumption, one need look no…
Limbo Photography is the first sign that Soi Cheang’s Limbo is different from the director’s past work. Though his return to Hong Kong was bound…
Pop Smoke When was the first time you heard Canarsie rapper Pop Smoke’s hulking, husky battle cry of a voice? It was probably over the…
Demonic suggests a few novel, fascinating twists to the horror template, and then runs away from them as fast as it can. In the six years…
Ma Belle, My Beauty is a lovingly realized and mature look at polyamory, but it fails to probe its emotional core sufficiently. Polyamory is a subject…
Back to the Wharf Li Xiaofeng’s Back to the Wharf begins with a tragic accident that escalates, shockingly, to murder. After high school student Song…
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,…
The Last Matinee is a modern Giallo effort that fails to reimagine, evolve, or even properly understand the form. The use of movie theaters as a…
“Rock and Roll Band,” the rousing, celebratory track that opens side two of the vinyl LP edition of Boston’s 1976 self-titled debut, spins the tale…
Free Guy is the rare tentpole based on an original idea rather than existing IP, and supplements that present-day novelty with a game cast and genuine…
In the history of metal music, there are perhaps no other records met with as much variance of opinion as Metallica’s 1991 self-titled album, which…
Beckett On paper, Beckett would seem to hold plenty of promise. Directed by Ferdinando Cito Filomarino and produced by his ex, Luca Guadagnino, the film…
Respect is a generic, overlong, unconvincing slog that’s disrespectful to the Queen of Soul’s legacy. When it comes to portraying pop culture icons known by millions…
Beckett rides the talents of its stacked crew to the most generic possible destination. On paper, Beckett would seem to hold plenty of promise. Directed by…
Thrice Upon a Time is yet another bold, challenging, pathos-filled apocalyptic plunge into the human psyche. Hideaki Anno is doing it all over again. No,…
Bull There’s no shortage of revenge pictures out there; at this point, it’s such a well-trod genre that it’s gone through its own classical-to-revisionist-and-back-again cycle.…