Music is a generic, offensive slog that co-opts ASD in service of bland musical pomp and an imbalanced plot. Pop songstress Sia titling her directorial…
Dear Comrades! is a nuanced reckoning with Stalinist legacy and the lingering brutality left in his wake. Offering a solemn look at Soviet society in…
Judas and the Black Messiah energizes necessary rhetoric and is impeccably crafted, but diminishes its power by sticking so closely to a prescribed biopic template.…
Barb and Star plays to Wiig’s most overindulgent and weirdo instincts, failing to strike the balance of her best comedic work. The career path forged…
The Map of Tiny Perfect Things is yet another time loop flick that fails to do anything to energize its exhausted conceit. Note to Hollywood:…
French Exit is an absolute disaster. The end. It takes truly talented people both in front of and behind the camera to make something as…
Land works best as a swooning mood piece, but lacks in thematic complexity and is too familiar by half. In Land — one of the…
Black Medusa In a thankless role as one of the most morose femmes fatales in memory, Nour Hajri plays Nada, a (mostly) mute office…
Red Post on Escher Street is a powerful, insurrectionary refutation of the larger culture’s nihilistic star-gazing and obliteration of art. Red Post on Escher Street,…
Space Sweepers boasts of welcome vein of social commentary but is hampered by endless plot convolutions and a pivot into cheap platitudes. Man first walked…
Bipolar The myth of Orpheus seems to tell us that in the face of overwhelming grief, the hardest thing to do is have faith…
Lapsis mines much of its dystopic power through appropriately small-scale world-building and clear-eyed rhetoric. Noah Hutton’s Lapsis is a genuine curiosity, a micro-budget sci-fi feature…
Crazy Samurai: 400 vs. 1 is a one-man spectacle that is hampered by repetitive filmmaking technique and some sloppy editing. Expectations for Crazy Samurai 400…
PVT CHAT hints at sapient commentary of our transactional internet age, but the gesture ultimately proves empty. Writer-director Ben Hozie’s latest, PVT CHAT, is another…
As We Like it The idea of an adaptation of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, set in an ultra-modern Taipei with an all-female cast, certainly…
Life in a Day 2020 is a treacly, tone-deaf effort that mostly ignores 2020’s extraordinary troubles in favor of reductive thinking and organizational logic. Documentaries…
We’re still working our way through our Sundance hangover, but that’s not stopping us…just slowing us down a bit. Forthcoming are 15-20 new pieces…
Bliss has its moments, but is ultimately far too satisfied with the faux-profundity of its deeply obvious ideas. Writer-director Mike Cahill is no stranger to…