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…
Llosa does her best to capture the delirium of the source material, but Fever Dream can’t quite sustain its dizzying, eerie tenor. Claudia Llosa’s Fever Dream is…
Endless Night is a film of well-meaning political engagement that succeeds only at conveying the intentionality of its aims. Endless Night falls into a recent spate…
Night Teeth is a generic, derivative DTV trifle that fails to make its vampire story vampy enough. Onto the heap of DTV detritus you can now…
Louis Wain has one distinctly lovely stretch, but it’s shrouded in pervasive busyness and zaniness that ultimately sinks the whole enterprise. Will Sharpe’s The Electrical Life of…
Lucky Chan-sil is a delicate, deeply humanist film superbly anchored by Kang’s lead performance. “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in…
The Velvet Underground proves an interesting resting place for a litany of period detritus, but stumbles when foregrounding its titular subjects. Todd Haynes, a noted semiotician,…