Dear Santa succeeds in encouraging an emotional response, but does in the most manipulative of fashions. Documentary filmmaker Dana Nachman strikes again. Her latest effort, Dear…
Kill It and Leave This Town is an impressive technical achievement and often stunning, but its central nihilism is oppressing and is bloated at feature length.…
Songbird is a well-directed but otherwise bland, opportunistic bit of pablum. The press materials for the new COVID thriller Songbird spill a lot of ink on…
Smiley Face Killers is a fascinating failure; not a good film, but frequently a compelling one. Brett Easton Ellis has never written a sympathetic character in his entire…
Don’t Click is an outdated, ineptly made film in the running for Worst of the Year honors. In 1997, Michael Haneke unleashed Funny Games onto an…
Love, Weddings & Other Disasters is sub-Garry Marshall drek built upon half-assed jokes and underdeveloped storylines. Dennis Dugan has gifted the world some of Adam Sandler’s…
Survival Skills doesn’t entirely work, but it’s a bolder film than it initially appears and at least may engender necessary social discourse. “That uniform doesn’t give…
Dreamland is a beautiful, lite-Malickian effort than smartly boasts both gorgeous, mythopoeic expositions and thrilling storytelling. Set during the Great Depression and amidst the dusty storms…
Much like the iconoclast at the center of this doc, Zappa is singular, uncompromising, and riveting. Whether you appreciate Frank Zappa’s work, few would deny the…
Monsoon is a poetic, aching work that details both the reclamation and awakening of one man’s lost identity. The alienation of a Vietnamese expatriate named Kit…
Triggered is a derivative, generic horror flick populated by insufferable assholes. Pass. With a title like Triggered, one might be forgiven for expecting some kind of…
Echo Boomers is a gratingly stupid film that is content to settle for mindless superficial strokes. “A true story…if you believe in such things.” So goes…
Girl is a deeply unremarkable, almost anonymous film that nonetheless testifies to the fascinating, untapped presence Bella Thorne offers. There isn’t real reason to brood much…
Dating Amber is a nice enough film in the way of so many other forgettable, generic coming-of-age efforts. Perhaps it should be taken as progress that…
Make Up brings a welcome horror twinge and unsettling tenor to an otherwise familiar kitchen sink drama. There’s no shortage of coming-of-age stories out there, so…
Born to Be tackles important subject matter but too often treats the individuals at its heart as subjects rather than partners in the documentary’s creation. Born…
Spontaneous tries to be too many things at once, and ultimately doesn’t scratch the surface of any of them. Spontaneous is a lot of things:…
Ham on Rye is a welcome departure from the typical trappings of a coming-of-age film. Coming-of-age narratives make up a significant proportion of contemporary independent…
The Antenna is a strange amalgam that might hold some intrigue for horror fans but is otherwise just another drab, generic Eastern Bloc allegory. Director Orcun…
La Belle Èpoque is superficial at best, and an endless string of clichés at worst. Time travel is a popular mechanism throughout film history for…
Once Upon a River is frequently pretty to look at, but Rose fails to build much depth into the film’s fable-like narrative. Once Upon a River…