Detention recommends director John Hsu’s future efforts, but this debut effort falls mostly short of the mark. John Hsu’s debut feature Detention isn’t so much a…
All My Life adopts the familiar form of any number of tragic romances without building any depth into its vision. Jessica Rothe is undoubtedly one of…
76 Days’ rhythms are occasionally uneven, but it remains a fascinating glimpse at one of the defining crises of our times. There’s a harrowing sense…
Red, White and Blue is incisive and deeply felt, but its conclusions don’t quite feel big enough for its format. Having now seen three of Steve…
Despite its misguided ending, Let Them All Talk remains a refreshingly open-ended and low-stakes pleasure. In the past decade, Adam Sandler has been regularly accused…
Anything for Jackson successfully manages the tricky balancing act of melding early comedy into outright terror. As festival season has gone mostly digital this year, we…
6ix9ine It was always kinda unlikely that Tekashi 6ix9ine would be able to maintain interest for more than a couple album cycles, and indeed, 2020…
Much like its main character, Another Round is a film firmly situated somewhere between thrill and disappointment. The 19th-century French poet, Charles Baudelaire once wrote, “You…
Nomadland’s delicate attention to storytelling tradition unfortunately gives way to conventionality in the film’s back half, displacing its early promise. Having just taken the top…
Black Bear is a challenging diptych study of life and art, and the blurred, impenetrable intersection of the two. In the debate between mimesis and anti-mimesis,…
Few debut albums have, since their initial release date, so easily defined themselves as a milestone and game-changer for a genre in the way of…
Sufjan Stevens What exactly is Sufjan Stevens ascending on his latest album? Celebrity? Corporate attention? This current political moment? God? All that and more, quite…
While perhaps slightly more superficial than a typical Morris, My Psychedelic Love Story is still another successful entry in the director’s continuing interrogation of late-1960s America.…
Mosul nails its action spectacle and kinetic foundation, but it is ultimately only able to conceive of its subject matter in war movie clichés. Yet another…
With Lovers Rock, McQueen mostly turns down his directorial affectations and let’s the film’s beauty and joy act as guide. Steve McQueen has always been a…
Superintelligence undermines its innocuous silliness and any potential rom-com aspirations with needlessly complicated stakes and a fixation on its own high concept. There’s a genuinely charming…
Microphones The unfolding biography of Phil Elverum’s life — which he has for years been telling under his Mount Eerie moniker, most exceptionally in a…
Happiest Season is trite, platitude-heavy Christmas offering that fails on nearly every front. Five years ago, when Todd Haynes’ Carol hit theaters, a moment was marked in which…
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…
In Wonder is an unfortunately empty, depthless bit of underwhelming, barely cinematic fan service. Who is Shawn Mendes? For anyone over the age of 25, that…