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 the…
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 excitement…
The Twin is a thoughtless, derivative bit of horror pap that feels like it was written by a bot. Utterly generic in every conceivable way,…
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. The…
Il buco is a rich, poetic film that seeks to articulate man’s existence both within and in tension with nature. Through a constant fusion of…
The Sadness delivers cartoonishly gory entertainment, but is less successful in delivering the Romero tradition of meaningful societal indictments. Canadian director Rob Jabbaz shot The…
We’ve all been told not to look at the sun before. We’ll go blind, they said; they told us in explicit detail the permanent damage…
A fascinating thesis and accompanying history lesson that never quite makes sense as a feature-length film, Travis Wilkerson & Erin Wilkerson new documentary Nuclear Family is trying to…
Fatherly guardedness is what defines Jean-René Etangsalé in the memory of his daughter, filmmaker and documentarian Erika Etangsalé. His being tight-lipped, however, was more a…
Answering the Sun We’ve all been told not to look at the sun before. We’ll go blind, they said; they told us in explicit detail…
Marmaduke is one of the most scatological films you’re ever likely to see, and so it’s fitting that it turns out to be an epic piece…
The Takedown is inoffensive as a buddy cop comedy, but runs into trouble with its reductive neoliberal political invocations. Louis Leterrier’s The Takedown, a sequel…
Like A Rolling Stone excels in conveying a vivid sense of the flesh-and-blood human behind the venerated byline. Ben Fong-Torres, the celebrated music journalist profiled in…
Happening is a film of intense linearity and physicality, but it leaves one wishing for a film that had perhaps widened its scope for more…
Multiverse of Madness is all endless, torturous exposition buried within soulless CGI spectacle, and an insult to Sam Raimi’s presence. Is it worth it to…
After Noé’s career peak with Climax, Lux Æterna represents a disappointing return to the director’s haphazard stylistic tics and overindulgent edgelord sensibilities. Like fellow provocateurs Lars von…
Human Nature’s looping narrative games don’t always work, but overall the film makes for an effective study of middle-class malaise. There’s not one, but two structural/temporal gambits…
Post-Dardenne social realism all too often functions as safe-enough filler material for international film fest lineups, but director Kim Se-in rather confidently finds her own…
Kinetic films that depict their restless women protagonists either in quenchless quest for their dreams or in non-stop endeavor to clear various obstacles should be…
You’d be forgiven if you mistook Shô Miyake’s new film, Small, Slow but Steady, for a documentary about the forest floor’s invisible undergrowth, or maybe…