Firestarter can’t recover from its weak script and insipid direction, meandering its way through a tension-free film populated by shallow, uninteresting characters. Fresh off…
In a 2006 article for the online magazine Senses of Cinema titled “Mapping Catalonia in 1967: The Barcelona School in Global Context,” Rosalind Galt…
Senior Year is an inconsistent, scattershot vanity project for Rebel Wilson, tanking every potentially interesting angle in favor of lame mugging. Austin Powers meets…
Top Gun: Maverick is the ultimate legacy sequel, and a thrilling ode to the fading era of true action movie stars. Slotting squarely into…
In Front of Your Face is a spiritual awakening of a film, tweaking Hong’s particular tenor from the past decade into something even more…
On the Count of Three can be uneven and frequently toes the line of twee, but ultimately settles into the right mix of broad…
Montana Story is a notably tender film, patient both in its flaying of old wounds and in sewing seeds of healing. Scott McGehee and…
Pleasure isn’t the first film to attack the intersection of capitalism, misogyny, and exploitation endemic to the porn industry, but it does so with…
The Innocents thankfully forgoes any social commentary in favor of impressive horror atmosphere and a study of childhood’s central paradox. When the director of…
Operation Mincemeat is precisely the kind of stolid history flick your dad will probably like but which bears little artistry to otherwise meaningfully distinguish…
Monstrous is the latest metaphor-heavy Babadook knockoff that viewers could do without. Imagine, for one brief moment, if the man behind the infamous 2007…
The official synopsis for Kersti Jan Werdal’s Lake Forest Park reads that “a group of teenagers have to come to terms with the violent death…
There’s something irresistible about the romantic self-obsessive. If asked, most people would probably not rank their love lives as the most interesting facet of…
Director Carl Elsaesser was teaching at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota when he learned of Joan Thurber Baldwin (1927-1990). She was a poet, amateur…
Lake Forest Park The official synopsis for Kersti Jan Werdal’s Lake Forest Park reads that “a group of teenagers have to come to terms with…
I read the original Dell Abyss paperback of Kathe Koja’s classic debut novel The Cipher in my early twenties. Koja’s voice immediately reignited my…
The Twin is a thoughtless, derivative bit of horror pap that feels like it was written by a bot. Utterly generic in every conceivable…
This Much I Know to Be True is a flowing, amorphous music-doc experience, both capturing and emulating the particularity of Nick Cave’s late-career art.…