All In: The Fight for American Democracy is the kind of political documentary that provides a slick, bland overview of its particular issue without…
The Glorias is shallow hagiography that fails to complicate the fascinating person it seeks to showcase. In July, Harper’s Magazine published “A Letter on Justice…
The low-stakes Get Duked! thankfully proves to be a more spirited and memorable comedy than its godawful title suggests. It has to be said:…
The Vast of Night opens with an assured and prefatory walk-and-talk, an extended tracking shot that first follows first Everett (Jake Horowitz), a local radio…
On September 27, 2014, the CW Network cut animation out of their Saturday morning bloc. They were the last network to do so. It…
The shallow characterizations at the core of Les Misérables dampen the effect of its incendiary anger. Ladj Ly’s debut feature may be called Les…
Seberg is just the latest film to signal its interest in issues of racial injustice, and progressive commentary, only to counterproductively build itself around the…
Playing out with an advocacy doc’s briskness and efficiency of exposition rather than a suspenseful chronicle of investigative journalism, Scott Z. Burns’ The Report…
A barrage of cuts set to the metronome of a ticking clock fragments the daily routine in and around a meat market in the…
With Ana, Mon Amour, director Calin Peter Netzer is desperately trying to align himself with the great figures of doomed romantic cinema, from Rivette and…
It shouldn’t surprise that a documentary tackling China’s population-curbing one-child policy, effectuated in the late 1970s and lasting until 2015, provides innately dramatic material,…
There’s nothing particularly new in Joe Penna’s survival drama Arctic. But the director’s gritty, hard-edged vision of human resilience strikes a primal chord that…
It’s unclear whether The Haunting of Sharon Tate exists as an outgrowth of the ongoing pop culture fascination with Charles Manson and the Manson…
Given Mindy Kaling’s standing as a woman of color with an established career in television — as an actress and a producer/creator — one…
Knife + Heart was probably the oddest entry in Cannes’s main competition slate last year — a trendy, queer, pop cinema throwback that stood-out…
“You know, I grew up around black people my whole life. I mean, if the truth be told, I probably know n***** better than…
The Professor and the Madman arrives with an awful lot of baggage for such a modest, unassuming movie. As detailed by Nick Shager in…
Over his 30-plus year career, Mike Leigh has incisively observed human interactions and dissected the various factors (upbringing, education, religion, etc.) that define those relations.…