Dear Comrades! is a nuanced reckoning with Stalinist legacy and the lingering brutality left in his wake. Offering a solemn look at Soviet society in the…
Judas and the Black Messiah energizes necessary rhetoric and is impeccably crafted, but diminishes its power by sticking so closely to a prescribed biopic template. The…
Barb and Star plays to Wiig’s most overindulgent and weirdo instincts, failing to strike the balance of her best comedic work. The career path forged by…
The Map of Tiny Perfect Things is yet another time loop flick that fails to do anything to energize its exhausted conceit. Note to Hollywood: No…
French Exit is an absolute disaster. The end. It takes truly talented people both in front of and behind the camera to make something as abysmal…
Land works best as a swooning mood piece, but lacks in thematic complexity and is too familiar by half. In Land — one of the two…
Black Medusa In a thankless role as one of the most morose femmes fatales in memory, Nour Hajri plays Nada, a (mostly) mute office worker…
Red Post on Escher Street is a powerful, insurrectionary refutation of the larger culture’s nihilistic star-gazing and obliteration of art. Red Post on Escher Street, the…
Space Sweepers boasts of welcome vein of social commentary but is hampered by endless plot convolutions and a pivot into cheap platitudes. Man first walked on…
Bipolar The myth of Orpheus seems to tell us that in the face of overwhelming grief, the hardest thing to do is have faith that…
Lapsis mines much of its dystopic power through appropriately small-scale world-building and clear-eyed rhetoric. Noah Hutton’s Lapsis is a genuine curiosity, a micro-budget sci-fi feature that…
Crazy Samurai: 400 vs. 1 is a one-man spectacle that is hampered by repetitive filmmaking technique and some sloppy editing. Expectations for Crazy Samurai 400 vs.…
PVT CHAT hints at sapient commentary of our transactional internet age, but the gesture ultimately proves empty. Writer-director Ben Hozie’s latest, PVT CHAT, is another film…
Of all the different horror sub-genres, the zombie flick is perhaps the one with the most innate spectacle. With a few obvious exceptions — low-budget…
As We Like it The idea of an adaptation of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, set in an ultra-modern Taipei with an all-female cast, certainly sounds…
Life in a Day 2020 is a treacly, tone-deaf effort that mostly ignores 2020’s extraordinary troubles in favor of reductive thinking and organizational logic. Documentaries like…
We’re still working our way through our Sundance hangover, but that’s not stopping us…just slowing us down a bit. Forthcoming are 15-20 new pieces on…
Bliss has its moments, but is ultimately far too satisfied with the faux-profundity of its deeply obvious ideas. Writer-director Mike Cahill is no stranger to spinning…
Little Fish is a pointless exercise in bleakness that boasts neither interesting characters nor much visual character. Chad Hartigan’s Little Fish dares to answer a question…
The Wanting Mare is a genuine CGI novelty, a delicate, low-key work of great sensitivity. More often than not, when one thinks of special effects extravaganzas,…
In the Same Breath For a while, Nanfu Wang’s In the Same Breath makes for a fascinating companion piece to Ai Weiwei’s 2020 documentary CoroNation.…