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,…
Madres hardly justifies the whole Blumhouse/Amazon deal, but it’s at least the best of the eight films that have come courtesy of it. Director Ryan Zaragoza’s Madres is…
The Manor isn’t necessarily a good film, but it’s a fun enough lite-horror outing that reflects an improvement from the Blumhouse/Amazon team-up. The law of averages…
Diana: The Musical is a tacky and tactless propanada mission that subverts its own fun flashiness with remarkable bad taste. When I was thirteen, I was…
V/H/S/94 isn’t entirely successful, but it marks an upswing for the anthology franchise from its last entry. The first V/H/S film was a novelty, a throwback to…
Black as Night is a remarkably dull vampire flick riddled with awful centrist politics. Part of the second wave of Blumhouse castoffs that have been repackaged…
Bingo Hell is at least a horror film unlike last year’s Amazon/Blumhouse offerings, but is too full of questionable craftsmanship and hollow messaging to recommend. The…
The Guilty should be primed for easy thrills, but Fuqua’s bland direction and the Scriptwriter 101 screenplay sap the film of any tension. Antoine Fuqua has…
Birds of Paradise benefits from gorgeous compositions and dreamy direction, but it never quite reaches the heights its artful pirouetting suggests. On paper, Sarah Adina Smith’s…
Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is a reductive, self-congratulatory musical that deeply cheapens its real-life subject. Everybody’s Talking About Jamie…everybody, that is, except Amazon Studios, who have…
The Starling is merely the latest by-the-numbers “issues” flick in Theodore Melfi’s bland filmography. It seems that director Theodore Melfi has never met a subject where…
Cinderella has exactly one idea to distinguish it, and it’s a bad one. 2021’s latest interpretation of the Cinderella fairy tale comes courtesy of Pitch Perfect…
Kate isn’t doing anything new from an action-narrative perspective, but slick choreography and gleeful violence helps this girlboss brutality go down smoothly. Kate, a female…
Martyrs Lane is the latest horror film built around a metaphor for trauma in which boredom and cliche trump any catharsis. There’s a palpable sense…
Fucking with Nobody is a radical, playful bit of meta-comedy that executes its risky conceit with aplomb. For her sophomore feature, Fucking with Nobody, Finnish director…
Diaz’s signature long-takes here work more to push the material into territory of fatalism rather than substantive political observation. Lav Diaz knows violence. The director’s…