The Deer King is beautiful to look at and occasionally charming, but its underdeveloped plot gets in the way of any pleasures and makes for an…
Gone in the Night is a slog undone by its own structural conceit, confining its compelling material to flashbacks and riding a wave of dull inertia…
By the time Chor Yuen’s Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan released in 1972, the image of wuxia in Hong Kong cinema had changed dramatically.…
Flux Gourmet has a few tasty morsels, but it mostly offers glimpses at the more adventurous filmmaker that Strickland used to be. The films of Peter…
Offseason is an undeniably slick film, but one too encumbered by bad aesthetic impulses and a too-shabby framework. Thirty minutes into Offseason, Marie Aldrich (Jocelin Donahue)…
A spy thriller about a curious subject — the power struggle to replace the Grand Imam of al-Azhar — Tarik Saleh’s Boy from Heaven is…
La Jauría, the debut film of Colombian director Andrés Ramírez Pulido, is set deep in the jungle at a strange prison camp for boys, a…
There Are No Saints is for exploitation heads only, a warmed-over rehash that excises much of Schrader’s heady themes in favor of bland bloodshed. In…
In ultimately providing too many answers to its excessive plotting, A Chiara extinguishes some of its more troubling and intriguing possibilities. A gangster film from the…
The Worst Ones, the debut film from Lise Akoka and Romane Gueret, opens on interviews with the young French people Flemish film director Gabriel (Johan…
Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers needs rescued from the Mouse House, which has here flattened the meta-reboot into a flavorless work of IP regurgitation. Somewhere…
Summer of Changsa is an exercise in useless misery that feels lifeless from start to finish. Having premiered three years ago, all the way back at…
The Takedown is inoffensive as a buddy cop comedy, but runs into trouble with its reductive neoliberal political invocations. Louis Leterrier’s The Takedown, a sequel…
Bubble is an altogether gentler anime product for Araki, aiming for the emotional stakes of films like Your Name, but is slight to the point of…
Sexual Drive draws the straightest possible line between food and sex, never striving for anything deeper or more creative than basic simile. For nearly as long…
The Cellar is far too bogged down in the why of its haunted house conceit, deferring thrills in its dull march to an inevitable conclusion. Brendan Muldowney’s The…
Nitram is the worst sort of armchair investigation — one that reopens wounds it doesn’t bother to heal. The True History of the Kelly Gang was…
Mo McRae’s directorial debut A Lot of Nothing is — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — a satirical thriller about race relations…
Texas Chainsaw Massacre is yet another forgettable series entry, distinguished only by its lame attempts at social relevancy. When David Gordon Green revived Laurie Strode…
All the Moons is a gorgeous, sorrowful, and achingly sensitive fairy tale. Though it at first looks like a typical, if particularly handsome, period vampire film,…
Here Before suggests early promise, but ultimately settles into rote psycho-thriller styling and manipulative table-setting. Stacey Gregg’s Here Before has all the markers of a good…