Penguin Bloom tries to expand itself a bit from template filmmaking, but mostly still trades in familiar disability narrative tropes and obvious metaphors. Regrettably, there…
Saint Maud is another A24 exercise in elevated, modulated horror but is fairly absent of anything beyond empty, artful pretense. It’s been a long journey to…
Zhu Shengze’s Present.Perfect. is preceded by information about the state of live-streaming in China, making clear its overwhelming popularity in the country — there were…
Malcolm and Marie is an affecting meditation on the private life of relationships and the closed-door conflicts that arise in the absence of an audience.…
The Night hints at building nuance into its familiar template, but ultimately jumbles familiar genre tropes to no discernible end. It’s never a good look to…
Liborio’s initial enigmas ultimately give way to something tidier and less pleasantly challenging. Olivorio Mateo, a farmer-turned-prophet whose providential oversight and teachings later influenced the…
True Mothers bears Kawase’s familiar textures and ambiance but is hampered by a few too many banal plot beats. Adapted from a 2015 bestseller by Mizuki…
The Little Things is a stylistically bankrupt, psychologically facile yawn of a movie. Largely forgotten in all the talk these days about how modest studio films…
Palmer has noble intentions and a winning performance from Timberlake, but it’s thematically undercooked and tonally jarring. Apple TV+’s Palmer, the latest film from actor/director Fisher…
Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream isn’t the exercise in solipsism or self-serving appropriative art its premise threatens, but its overall effect is one of cautious distance.…
In his 1978 book Orientalism, historian and cultural critic Edward Said writes: “Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not…
You Will Die at Twenty contains plenty of allegorical power, but its ineffectual plotting ultimately teases out more stimulating questions than it does answers. As a…
Run Hide Fight can go fuck itself. Any film critic worth their salt can speak to the near-impossible task of reviewing films in a true vacuum,…
American Skin is a smug, self-congratulatory vanity project that is sledgehammer-subtle and utterly depthless. Actor Nate Parker took the 2016 Sundance Film Festival by storm with…
Psycho Goreman offers undeniably impressive practical effects and exactly nothing else. In director Steven Kostanski’s Psycho Goreman, two children — brother and sister — dig up…
Don’t Tell a Soul is an entertaining enough diversion than could have been so much more. There was always something slightly sinister lurking beneath the surface…
Breaking Fast is a delicate, charming, and welcomingly chaste love story that features an old-fashioned appeal. The marketing materials for the new queer comedy Breaking Fast…
Savage State is more fetish than flesh, settling for cyphers that vaguely reflect old Western classics. Although the Western may be long past its heyday, there…
Supernova is a restrained love story that manages to balance out the territory’s innate sentimentality. While actor-turned-director Harry Macqueen’s debut film Hinterland utilized the premise of…
Bloody Hell boasts obvious talent both behind and in front of the camera, but is belabored by its stale tics and tonal indecision. As film festivals…