Death Valley is an underwhelming but mostly inoffensive bit of lightweight genre work, delivering a few moments and overcoming obvious budget limitations. As has been periodically…
Mother/Android isn’t anything more than another generic sci-fi copycat built from the spare parts of better flicks. Even 40-odd years on, Ridley Scott’s dual sci-fi…
There’s plenty to admire in The Novice, but a surfeit of ambition and an overreliance on certain aggressive formal qualities bogs down its execution.…
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…
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…
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…
Filmmaker Lucy Walker’s new documentary Bring Your Own Brigade is a large, unwieldy film, bursting at the seams with ideas. While occasionally unfocused, Walker…
The Strings is pure vibe-y lite-horror, director Ryan Glover skilled at eerie mood-setting and constructing effective compositions and ambiance. Ryan Glover’s new film The Strings is…
Mother is both brutal and poetic, a contention with self and homeland, and an introduction to one of contemporary cinema’s most exciting voices. When Lemohang…
Uppercase Print mishmashes modes and can become a bit of a slog, but there’s enough formal playfulness to recommend it as a valuable addition to…
Hell Hath No Fury is something of a departure for Jesse V. Johnson, but the director once again delivers a tough, kinetic actioner, here aided…
A Cop Movie is a clever deconstruction that doesn’t add up to much more than a grab bag of meta elements, but it at least…
One Shot employs its titular gimmick to no discernible value, but its actioner bona fides offer top-notch DTV thrills. Over the course of the last…
Gleefully violent and hyper-stylish but ultimately empty and overlong, The Harder They Fall ultimately manages only to trade in well-worn tropes and clichés. The…
The Beta Test is a bold advancement for Jim Cummings as a filmmaker, supplementing his films’ familiar character with greater formal skill and precise critique.…
Freeland stumbles when it feels compelled to inject arbitrary conflict, but is an otherwise sturdy, necessarily cynical portrait of modern economic peril. The legalization of…
Val suggests talent behind the camera, but it’s largely wasted on a wisp of an idea. There’s a deep, dark mystery at the heart of…
André De Toth is one of the great, unsung directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age. As Fred Camper noted in a 1997 essay bemoaning his…