Held manages to best Cluff and Lofing’s The Gallows, but it still an abysmal, problematic, and tension-free failure. The new marriage-in-peril thriller Held comes courtesy…
“Movies don’t scare me” — said a straight-faced and stoical John Carpenter to Mick Garris in a 1982 television interview called “Fear on Film.” (Accompanying…
The Power doesn’t hold a lot of mystery but thrives by situating its political and cultural critiques as blunt, horrific text. There’s something sinister lurking…
Mamade Claude isn’t much more than shallow period dress-up and empty provocation. Set, for the most part, in the final tumultuous years of the Swinging…
Concrete Cowboy features a pair of solid performances and a sleek visual design, but suffers under the weight of its paint-by-numbers approach to narrative. Set…
Funny Face works as genre deconstruction and cinema of a certain geography, but its attempts at explicit commentary are less successful. Tim Sutton is a…
Under the guise of complacent nothingness, the characters of Philippe Garrel’s Regular Lovers manage to paradoxically enact and participate in sundry relationships, death drives, drug…
WeWork is somewhat limited in focus and doesn’t always plumb deeply, but remains an intermittently fascinating portrait of a conman and his grift. When applying…
When I was 22, my best friend and I lived together for a while in the apartment where I grew up. We were a twenty-minute…
Nina Wu’s early patience and promise unfortunately gives way to a more sensationalized, ill-conceived study of trauma. Hailed as Taiwan’s answer to the #MeToo movement…
This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection is a remarkable debut, a tonally complex and visually sumptuous marvel. Existing in a kind of liminal…
The Unholy is a jump scare-centric, heavy-handed horror slog with little atmosphere and even less mystery. Keeping the good old-fashioned huckster spirit alive, Sony’s genre imprint…
Godzilla vs. Kong isn’t a perfect film, but it features franchise-best VFX and links to Toho-era entries in its commitment to visual spectacle over narrative.…
Every Breath You Take is a derivative, cliché-riddled yawn that would be more at home on late-night cable than on theater screens. While its title…
Episode Description: This week, we’re talking 2021’s first legitimate blockbuster (of a sort): Zack Snyder’s Justice League, the four-hour behemoth currently streaming on HBO Max.…
Shiva Baby thrives as the kind of festival-circuit dramedy that overcomes the genre’s twee stigma thanks to its surprising restraint and refinement. North American film…
If one were to properly date when Pascal Arbez-Nicolas’ cultural ascension commenced — from his humble beginning as a no-name disk jockey, steadily slumming it…
Honeydew is the latest effort to angle toward the elevated horror label without providing much substance to this framework. Premiering at the Nightstream Film Festival…
Released in March of 1981, Michael Mann’s Thief is one of the great debut feature films, a fully-formed work that shows a young(ish) director firmly…
Bad Trip fulfills its minimum obligation to produce a baseline number of laughs, and does very little else. Bad Trip is yet another casualty of…
Tina might not be as encompassing as some viewers might like, but the result is a moving, celebratory tribute doc all the same. One of the…