True Mothers bears Kawase’s familiar textures and ambiance but is hampered by a few too many banal plot beats. Adapted from a 2015 bestseller by Mizuki Tsujimura, Naomi Kawase’s True Mothers is a melodrama rendered with an admirable textural specificity and a feel for the…
The Little Things is a stylistically bankrupt, psychologically facile yawn of a movie. Largely forgotten in all the talk these days about how modest studio films for adults aren’t really being made anymore is that, when they are, they’re usually lousy. Most are winding up…
Palmer has noble intentions and a winning performance from Timberlake, but it’s thematically undercooked and tonally jarring. Apple TV+’s Palmer, the latest film from actor/director Fisher Stevens, is a lot of things: a classic tale of personal redemption; a woke study of gender identity; a…
Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream isn’t the exercise in solipsism or self-serving appropriative art its premise threatens, but its overall effect is one of cautious distance. In 2010, visual artist Christian Marclay premiered a new montage work, titled The Clock, that was 24-hours in length…
You Will Die at Twenty contains plenty of allegorical power, but its ineffectual plotting ultimately teases out more stimulating questions than it does answers. As a motif in his film, Amjad Abu Alala enacts a small gesture, one intimately coupled to the narrative’s concerns: Muzamil,…
Run Hide Fight can go fuck itself. Any film critic worth their salt can speak to the near-impossible task of reviewing films in a true vacuum, with personal biases, production knowledge, and the contextual influence of a director’s past works rendering objectivity a beautiful rarity.…
American Skin is a smug, self-congratulatory vanity project that is sledgehammer-subtle and utterly depthless. Actor Nate Parker took the 2016 Sundance Film Festival by storm with his directorial debut The Birth of a Nation, which chronicled the famed 1831 slave rebellion led by preacher Nat…
Psycho Goreman offers undeniably impressive practical effects and exactly nothing else. In director Steven Kostanski’s Psycho Goreman, two children — brother and sister — dig up an evil alien beefcake hellbent on destroying the universe. Thankfully, he’s also easily controlled with the help of the…
Don’t Tell a Soul is an entertaining enough diversion than could have been so much more. There was always something slightly sinister lurking beneath the surface of Rainn Wilson’s portrayal of Dwight Schrute in the American version of The Office, and that unsettling affect is…
Breaking Fast is a delicate, charming, and welcomingly chaste love story that features an old-fashioned appeal. The marketing materials for the new queer comedy Breaking Fast make the film look like the kind of salacious, low-budget filler clogging the pipelines of Amazon Prime, with its…
