Stowaway suffers from a contrived script and poor character-building, but works considerably better when maximizing its budget in service of action spectacle. A three-person mission…
Together Together is a chemistry-rich, mature, and restrained effort of non-rom comedy. It’s never a promising sign when a film’s opening credits mimic a certain…
Bloodthirsty is bland amalgam of werewolf flick signifiers and horror film clichés that do little to establish any unique voice. Reviewing Eight for Silver at…
Hope is an emotionally brutal, bruising film about the tricky territory that comes between love and loss. Hope is the kind of film that, on…
Boys from County Hell boasts a strong premise, but never entirely commits to either its horror or comedy elements. There’s a cairn out in a…
Hopinka’s feature debut is a poetic and evocative film, one that seeks to quantify and articulate the symbiosis of humanity and earth. A prolific maker…
Red Moon Tide offers impressive sonic and visual craft, but is somewhat undermined by its weaker narrative and character elements. An elegiac stillness envelops the…
Ride or Die is overlong, fails to believably sell its central relationship, and ill-advisedly resolves with a bit male gaze exploitation. Whatever the many other…
Monday is a derivative, dull, and altogether flat effort that captures none of the carefree spirit it partially peddles. With an overly familiar and intentionally simple…
For the Sake of Vicious doesn’t reinvent anything, but is a lean, nasty thriller that doubles as a remarkable calling card for the directing duo.…
Vanquish is bad, bizarrely so, but it’s at least not boring in its own dumpster fire way. After a few hits as a writer, including…
The Banishing is a welcome-back for director Christopher Smith, rendering fresh what could have been boilerplate, and keeping its human horrors palpably textual. It’s curious that…
IWOW is a work of pure hubris and self-aggrandizement, entirely devoid of the humanity that has informed Allah’s previous works. Over the course of his career,…
Voyagers is a shallow, bland, and empty-headed space-set riff of Lord of the Flies that fails to choose either heady futurism or sci-fi eroticism. It’s…
Wheatley’s latest both builds and holds tension effectively, harnessing the director’s penchant for psychedelia and bruising horror to brutal effect. When Martin remarks at the…
Gunda is an empty, exploitative aesthetic exercise that that has no ideas to speak of. If nothing else — and it truly offers little else —…
Night in Paradise scans like any number of slow-burn gangster flicks, but suffers for lack of originality in both its action and drama. Park Hoon-jung’s…
Not all of the poetic evocations of Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Those That work, but it’s still a lively, playful, and niche document of art creation.…
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 christened…
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 Thunder…
Moffie is a visually striking film but one which suffers for failing to fully commit to the ugliness inherent to its narrative. Moffie is the…