Silent Night is more holiday punishment than gift. Featuring a floor-to-ceiling stacked cast and a festive setting and title, one might assume that Silent Night, the…
Try Harder! submits itself to a certain festival-friendly documentary texture rather than acting as a probing reflection of its sociopolitical environment. One of the many tensions…
Encanto can be a bit boring, a bit shallow, and a bit underwhelming in the musical department, but its gorgeous animation and rather quaint character make…
The Summit of the Gods proves that the new subgenre of mountaineering movies can successfully and beautifully extend to the world of animation. The rapidly…
Bruised is a dumb, derivative riff on Rocky, yet another work of deglamorization that fails to scrape beyond its grimy surface. It seems only appropriate that a…
There’s a potentially great movie buried in Encounter, one that Pearce scuttles in service of a high concept that goes mostly nowhere. Riz Ahmed has…
Potentially useful as pedagogical sledgehammer, Burning unfortunately isn’t much of an aesthetic object. Vividly illustrating Australia’s devastating “Black Summer” wildfires, which raged off and on from June…
Isolation is a contrived gimmick flick that shoehorns in topical fodder without nuance or authenticity. Isolation, a horror anthology co-produced by James P. Gannon and Nathan…
Night at the Eagle Inn is a 2-star destination you’re better off driving right past. Brothers Erik and Carson Bloomquist might just be the hardest working…
Beans offers good intentions and not much else, demonstrating neither the polish nor dramatic bona fides to pull off such a serious true-life treatment. It wouldn’t…
Unstuck in Time offers intimate portraiture of its subject without ever resorting to apologia or hagiography. In 1982, a young Robert B. Weide wrote to his…
She Paradise abandons the physicality at its core for an unfortunate bit of dubious messaging. Lost in the anonymous aesthetic swarm that is digital, independent filmmaking,…
Clerk plays out like a love letter from Smith to himself, not offering much for the rest of us involved in the film-watching process. For movie…
Dangerous is content to ride its plateaued production structure of cribbed parts to the territory of who cares. When speaking of Dangerous, it’s difficult to not make…
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…
Boiling Point resists the temptation toward food porn aestheticizing and instead builds a tightly-wound thriller from the anxiety of a working-class existence. Perhaps more so than…
Cusp is a frequently gorgeous doc that lights on some fascinating presentational modes and psychological insights, but which stumbles in last-minute bid for palliative punctuation. The…
Procession Certain films allow cinema to display its unbridled capacity for humanity. Certain films can truly change lives, as hyperbolic as that may sound. Robert…
Drive My Car is the latest proof that Ryusuke Hamaguchi is thinking much bigger than most of his contemporaries. Ryusuke Hamaguchi has fast become one of…
Procession is a work of communal catharsis, applying Greene’s particular documentarian inclinations to emotionally potent ends. Certain films allow cinema to display its unbridled capacity for…
The First Wave isn’t much more than an ornamental object, pointlessly self-assured in its distasteful aesthetic manipulations. The compartmentalization that contemporary documentary tends to engender —…