Red, White and Blue is incisive and deeply felt, but its conclusions don’t quite feel big enough for its format. Having now seen three of Steve McQueen’s five Small Axe films (the final two held hostage by Amazon until December), it’s easier to trace out…
With Lovers Rock, McQueen mostly turns down his directorial affectations and let’s the film’s beauty and joy act as guide. Steve McQueen has always been a fine purveyor of potentially rich and powerful narratives, but he’s been much less consistent as their steward. His first…
Dating Amber is a nice enough film in the way of so many other forgettable, generic coming-of-age efforts. Perhaps it should be taken as progress that films like the gay coming-of-age teen dramedy Dating Amber are no longer anomalies within the cinematic landscape. Strides have…
Mangrove too often gets lost in its dusty courtroom formula, but it at least boasts a human center that contrasts with the film’s trial spectacle. Steve McQueen has spent the last decade making films that are quite decidedly about America, creating a body of work…
Sound of Metal is not the sonic game-changer that its marketing once suggested, but it works marginally better as a restrained, if formulaic drama. Sound of Metal seems to believe itself to be part of some kind of sonic evolution in cinema. It isn’t. Darius Marder’s…
This Borat sequel is up to familiar antics but is far too sold on its own unearned sense of importance. 2006 was a much simpler time; it was an age where the juvenile antics of a 30-something British dude — one who became an international…
Nocturne, while imperfect and visually deficient, nonetheless represents the best yet of Amazon’s Welcome to the Blumhouse collab. Part of the second batch of Blumhouse films premiering direct-to-streaming on Amazon, Nocturne, while far from perfect, at least shows what this distribution experiment could be capable…
Evil Eye marks an improvement on the first wave of Welcome to the Blumhouse titles, but remains a mostly ineffective at developing either genre styling or any visceral power. Evil Eye, the latest release in Amazon’s exclusive Welcome to the Blumhouse film series, carries on…
Black Box is a lazy, boring, and self-serious entry in the Welcome to the Blumhouse project. The second feature in Amazon’s Welcome to the Blumhouse film series, Black Box is ostensibly more of a horror film than the just-released The Lie. That said, a dude crab-walking…
The Lie is a generic, inauspicious inauguration for Amazon’s Welcome to the Blumhouse collaboration. Just in time for Halloween, uber-producer Jason Blum (and his Blumhouse Pictures) has teamed up with Amazon to release eight features directly to the commerce giant’s streaming platform. While the press…
