Songbird is a well-directed but otherwise bland, opportunistic bit of pablum. The press materials for the new COVID thriller Songbird spill a lot of ink on…
Smiley Face Killers is a fascinating failure; not a good film, but frequently a compelling one. Brett Easton Ellis has never written a sympathetic character in his entire…
Don’t Click is an outdated, ineptly made film in the running for Worst of the Year honors. In 1997, Michael Haneke unleashed Funny Games onto an…
Love, Weddings & Other Disasters is sub-Garry Marshall drek built upon half-assed jokes and underdeveloped storylines. Dennis Dugan has gifted the world some of Adam Sandler’s…
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 or…
Survival Skills doesn’t entirely work, but it’s a bolder film than it initially appears and at least may engender necessary social discourse. “That uniform doesn’t give…
Minari sets up opportunities for deep engagement, but it mostly forgoes those in favor a flattened series of simplistic, bittersweet vignettes as narrative. Bill Forsyth’s Housekeeping…
The Prom doesn’t offer much in the way of insight or novelty, but its glitz-and-glitter styling is a welcome confection at the end of 2020. Ryan…
Farewell Amor resembles, in shape, less accomplished recent indie efforts, but it eschews much of their patness in creating something altogether more complex and affecting. From…
Alex Wheatle is the slightest of the Small Axe films in many ways, but it’s also perhaps the most instructive as to the project’s overarching concerns. Having left…
Wild Mountain Thyme is a hurried, generic The Quiet Man-Hallmark fairy tale mashup, with all the mess and none of the fun that description suggests. From the…
ON-GAKU: Our Sound is something of a strange contradiction, managing both stupidity and profundity in equal measure. Kenji Iwaisawa was able to accomplish something few in…
Identifying Features Within a cinematic tradition that associates the violence of Mexico’s crime-infested northern border with the high-stakes machismo of drug cartels and CIA spies,…
To the Ends of the Earth is a masterwork of adventurous, boundary-less filmmaking. Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been here before. Not to Uzbekistan, where his newest film…
There is potential potency to the character work in A Family Tour, but the flat direction renders nearly every scene frustratingly inert. There’s no shortage…
Archenemy nicely compensates for its budget with some bits of visual aplomb, but it amounts to little as the film frustratingly spends most of its time…
The New Directors/New Films festival has emerged in recent years as a major player on the festival scene, programming such diverse heavy-hitters as Black Mother, An…
Detention recommends director John Hsu’s future efforts, but this debut effort falls mostly short of the mark. John Hsu’s debut feature Detention isn’t so much a…
All My Life adopts the familiar form of any number of tragic romances without building any depth into its vision. Jessica Rothe is undoubtedly one of…
76 Days’ rhythms are occasionally uneven, but it remains a fascinating glimpse at one of the defining crises of our times. There’s a harrowing sense…