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…
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…
Moffie is a visually striking film but one which suffers for failing to fully commit to the ugliness inherent to its narrative. Moffie is…
Slalom is a raw and unpretentious study of trauma and the ways in which young women can wrest back control of their own course.…
Held manages to best Cluff and Lofing’s The Gallows, but it still an abysmal, problematic, and tension-free failure. The new marriage-in-peril thriller Held comes…
The Power doesn’t hold a lot of mystery but thrives by situating its political and cultural critiques as blunt, horrific text. There’s something sinister…
Mamade Claude isn’t much more than shallow period dress-up and empty provocation. Set, for the most part, in the final tumultuous years of the…
Concrete Cowboy features a pair of solid performances and a sleek visual design, but suffers under the weight of its paint-by-numbers approach to narrative.…
Funny Face works as genre deconstruction and cinema of a certain geography, but its attempts at explicit commentary are less successful. Tim Sutton is…
WeWork is somewhat limited in focus and doesn’t always plumb deeply, but remains an intermittently fascinating portrait of a conman and his grift. When…
Nina Wu’s early patience and promise unfortunately gives way to a more sensationalized, ill-conceived study of trauma. Hailed as Taiwan’s answer to the #MeToo…
This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection is a remarkable debut, a tonally complex and visually sumptuous marvel. Existing in a kind of…
The Unholy is a jump scare-centric, heavy-handed horror slog with little atmosphere and even less mystery. Keeping the good old-fashioned huckster spirit alive, Sony’s genre…
Godzilla vs. Kong isn’t a perfect film, but it features franchise-best VFX and links to Toho-era entries in its commitment to visual spectacle over…
Every Breath You Take is a derivative, cliché-riddled yawn that would be more at home on late-night cable than on theater screens. While its…
Shiva Baby thrives as the kind of festival-circuit dramedy that overcomes the genre’s twee stigma thanks to its surprising restraint and refinement. North American…
Honeydew is the latest effort to angle toward the elevated horror label without providing much substance to this framework. Premiering at the Nightstream Film…