A New Era is no masterpiece, but it’s a far cozier and more fitting franchise send-off than its predecessor managed to be. Downton Abbey:…
You Won’t Be Alone is an emotional and aesthetic masterwork, and a stirring expression of the human condition. Goran Stolevski’s feature-length debut, You Won’t Be…
The Northman is a brutal and beautiful bit of mythic spectacle, but can still sometimes feel restrained despite its outsized production. Gather round: it’s time…
The Outfit is a glossy but empty prestige crime drama that mistakes convolution for compelling plotting. Early in The Outfit, our central protagonist, a mild-mannered…
More poodle than Wolf, Biancheri’s film is a frustratingly tame and conservative treatment of potentially fascinating material. Ten years ago, a film like Wolf would…
There’s very little to distinguish Belfast as a work of art, a film that uses its dramatic and formal elements only in service of feel-good…
Last Night in Soho is a seductive and sumptuous Giallo riff, but suffers from a final act that undermines much of the film’s early…
Blue Bayou’s reach for authenticity is entirely undermined by its empty, saccharine sheen of melodrama. In its broad strokes, writer-director Justin Chon’s Blue Bayou…
The Card Counter takes a similar shape to many of Schrader’s Lonely Man films, but this latest can’t quite overcome the template and thrive…
Stillwater tiptoes around complex, potentially rich discourse without ever committing to any real ideological principle. Who is Tom McCarthy, really? Once a semi-successful TV actor,…
Roadrunner doesn’t revolutionize the portrait documentary, but it does execute its essential elements with pathos and formal precision. The late culinary connoisseur Anthony Bourdain…
The Sparks Brothers is an energetic, cinematic homage to one of the most cinematic musical groups of all-time. For most of their fans and listeners,…
Final Account is not just a reckoning with history, but with its present lingering, executed with uncompromising force and first-hand immediacy. Released after the death…
Profile’s subject matter is more than a little silly, but its thrilling Screenlife tinkering speaks to the form’s malleability and still-untapped potential. 2021 really…
Sharrock’s middlebrow approach and sitcom-ready style undermines much of Limbo’s potential power. About a decade ago, Serge Daney’s then recently-translated essay “The Tracking Shot…
Author/chef/attorney/entrepreneur Eddie Huang adds a few more bullets to his CV as writer and director of coming-of-age drama Boogie, the tale of a Chinese-American…
Land works best as a swooning mood piece, but lacks in thematic complexity and is too familiar by half. In Land — one of the…
Promising Young Woman does its best to reshape the rape-revenge narrative into a novel form, but it ultimately fails to muster much ambiguity or thorniness.…