While many of us lingered and struggled inside of our homes — and are still patiently following quarantine protocols until this global pandemic ends (with…
Max Cloud is an utter waste of underground action star Scott Adkins’ talents, and curious DTV aficionados should look elsewhere for their genre thrills. For those…
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…
Education is Small Axe’s punctuation mark and the film that brings the entire project to an inspired and even celebratory conclusion. Regardless of whether one thinks…
Like Fences before it, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is another well-intention August Wilson adaptation that can’t seem to rise above its stagy origins. Adapted from the 1982 stage play…
Nasir What’s immediately striking about Nasir, Arun Karthick’s sophomore feature, is the ebb-and-flow rhythm of its slice-of-life portraiture. Karthick immediately and consistently trains his camera…
Monster Hunter suggests that Paul W.S. Anderson has exhausted his bag of tricks and is soullessly recycling familiar fare to diminishing results. The lore of Monster…
Greenland does well to focus on its human center rather than CGI spectacle, but its pleasures remain mostly minor. The disaster film is a genre as…
SKYLIN3S is a wonderfully weird and wild addition to the Skyline series and a bright star of the DTV renaissance. Anybody clocking the original Skyline way…
My Prince Edward is presided over by star Stephy Tang and director Norris Wong, both of whom reject schematism in favor of more subtle, surprising work.…
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…
Minari sets up opportunities for deep engagement, but it mostly forgoes those in favor a flattened series of simplistic, bittersweet vignettes as narrative. Bill Forsyth’s Housekeeping…
The Prom doesn’t offer much in the way of insight or novelty, but its glitz-and-glitter styling is a welcome confection at the end of 2020. Ryan…
Farewell Amor resembles, in shape, less accomplished recent indie efforts, but it eschews much of their patness in creating something altogether more complex and affecting. From…
Alex Wheatle is the slightest of the Small Axe films in many ways, but it’s also perhaps the most instructive as to the project’s overarching concerns. Having left…
Wild Mountain Thyme is a hurried, generic The Quiet Man-Hallmark fairy tale mashup, with all the mess and none of the fun that description suggests. From the…
ON-GAKU: Our Sound is something of a strange contradiction, managing both stupidity and profundity in equal measure. Kenji Iwaisawa was able to accomplish something few in…
Identifying Features Within a cinematic tradition that associates the violence of Mexico’s crime-infested northern border with the high-stakes machismo of drug cartels and CIA spies,…
To the Ends of the Earth is a masterwork of adventurous, boundary-less filmmaking. Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been here before. Not to Uzbekistan, where his newest film…
There is potential potency to the character work in A Family Tour, but the flat direction renders nearly every scene frustratingly inert. There’s no shortage…