Potentially useful as pedagogical sledgehammer, Burning unfortunately isn’t much of an aesthetic object. Vividly illustrating Australia’s devastating “Black Summer” wildfires, which raged off and on from June…
Cusp is a frequently gorgeous doc that lights on some fascinating presentational modes and psychological insights, but which stumbles in last-minute bid for palliative punctuation. The…
Procession is a work of communal catharsis, applying Greene’s particular documentarian inclinations to emotionally potent ends. Certain films allow cinema to display its unbridled capacity for…
The Strings is pure vibe-y lite-horror, director Ryan Glover skilled at eerie mood-setting and constructing effective compositions and ambiance. Ryan Glover’s new film The Strings is almost…
The Trouble with Being Born is remarkable not just for its futurism and ambient atmosphere, but for the care with which its relationships — not all…
Thy Kingdom Come feels like what it is — deleted scenes from (and a misapprehension of) To the Wonder rather than a supplement to its beauty.…
Prayers for the Stolen is blunt to the point of crassness and riddled with manipulative cliché. Making its way over to NYFF after picking up a…
Accidental Luxuriance is a poorly-paced, rancid mixture of conflicting aesthetic elements. Far more than its rather nonsensical title and unconventional mix of animation styles, the general…
Most people’s familiarity with the Attica Prison Rebellion of 1971 is strictly limited to Sidney Lumet’s 1975 crime drama Dog Day Afternoon, in which Al…
tick, tick…BOOM! fails to live up to its explosive title, unimaginatively relying on built-in Broadway love and the myth of its subject. It’s only taken Lin-Manuel…
Neither didactic nor restrained, Ascension is a mesmerizing film that uncovers the face of a nation’s stoic realism. Civilization’s pursuit of unfettered growth has often clashed with…
Red Notice is as close to an algorithm-written film as the world has yet had the displeasure of viewing. A few years back, there was a…
If you want your holidays ruined, you should definitely watch Home Sweet Home Alone. When the Walt Disney Company bought out 20th Century Fox in…
A Man Named Scott is a vanity project doc that pushes a hip hop-savior narrative at the expense of any meaningful substance or study. If you…
Jimmy O. Yang makes for an unconventional, likeable lead, but Love Hard is an otherwise frothy and disposable holiday trifle. The bafflingly titled Love Hard would seem…
A Cop Movie is a clever deconstruction that doesn’t add up to much more than a grab bag of meta elements, but it at least seems…
Finch is entirely predictable and low stakes, but the duo of nice-guy Hanks and a cute pup musters enough pleasant earnestness to keeps things afloat. Sometime…
Gleefully violent and hyper-stylish but ultimately empty and overlong, The Harder They Fall ultimately manages only to trade in well-worn tropes and clichés. The Harder…
Like so many pastiches before it, the thematically unfocused Dead & Beautiful succumbs to its own vacuous sheen. In the metropolitan center of Taipei, five young…
Passing’s insularity is both a blessing and a curse, but its internalized emotions simmering just beneath the surface manage to speak volumes. Based on the…