Facile, mawkish songwriting, bland production, and an overly-affected show of “authenticity” do major injustice to Justice. Justin Beiber wants to sell you a narrative:…
Promises is a masterwork of collaboration, a suite that both teaches and bestows patience, tranquility, and openness. Promises — a ravishing collaboration between Floating…
Justin Bieber Justin Beiber wants to sell you a narrative: that the once-dumb adolescent from Ontario has grown up, found God (ok, he’s always…
After releasing notorious flop/secret success Exorcist II: The Heretic in 1977, director John Boorman turned to an attempt at producing a Lord of the…
Unlike Puiu’s similarly-shaped Sieranevada, Malmkrog is all empty abstraction, mistaking prattle for praxis. “For a talking cinema”: that’s the title that a young Maurice Scherer, not yet…
Thunder Force is yet another high-concept comedy collab between McCarthy and Falcone that fails at, well, being funny. On its surface, a film like…
Is 4 Lovers both reminds of DFA’s appeal and evinces the diminishing results when they stray from their template. Death From Above 1979 seem…
Carrie Underwood At no point in her career has Carrie Underwood hidden her Christian faith; after American Idol, and the coronation single that followed,…
Funny Face works as genre deconstruction and cinema of a certain geography, but its attempts at explicit commentary are less successful. Tim Sutton is…
Under the guise of complacent nothingness, the characters of Philippe Garrel’s Regular Lovers manage to paradoxically enact and participate in sundry relationships, death drives,…
When I was 22, my best friend and I lived together for a while in the apartment where I grew up. We were a…
Released in March of 1981, Michael Mann’s Thief is one of the great debut feature films, a fully-formed work that shows a young(ish) director…
My Salinger Year is a gently romantic, old-fashioned love letter to literature and those irrevocably shaped by it. Philippe Falardeau’s My Salinger Year is the…
Happily is heady, genuinely hilarious, and a work of impressive tonal balance from director BenDavid Grabinski. The law of diminishing returns dictates that, over time,…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service…
The Spine of Night The Spine of Night is a whole lot of movie. Despite the film’s relatively straightforward fantasy logline — sorcerer goes…
Fucking with Nobody For her sophomore feature, Fucking with Nobody, Finnish director Hannaleena Hauru opts to play an on-screen alter-ego of herself. Hanna is…
As an inadvertent result of the world’s continued struggle against COVID-19, writer-director Martin Edralin’s Canadian family drama Islands evinces an unexpected form of empathy;…
Gaia There’s an ancient, malevolent force living in the depths of the forest in director Jaco Bouwer’s Gaia, a psychedelic bit of eco-horror that finds…