Ghosts of the Ozarks tees up a potentially fascinating horror-western premise, but much of its appeal dissipates as its back half becomes frustratingly obvious. There’s…
Lucrecia Martel is one of our great contemporary filmmakers, so much so that even a modestly scaled, short work like Terminal Norte demands some attention.…
If recent interviews are any indication, John Carpenter seems to have settled into a comfortable semi-retirement consisting of video games, weed, and collecting money from…
The Cursed is blessed with beautiful images but is otherwise plagued by an overly familiar werewolf narrative. Why’s it so hard to make a good…
There’s some mild fun to be had with Last Looks’ particular soft noir style, but it ultimately registers as a pale imitation of something you’ve seen…
Like so much recent horror, Slapface relies too heavily on soft metaphor, but there’s sufficient talent here to still keep things interesting. Jeremiah Kipp’s Slapface…
Erudite and playful and moving, The Worst Person in the World is brimming with ideas and feeling, and executed with the touch of a master storyteller. First…
There Will Be No More Night is an intelligent, nightmarish portrait of war as first-person shooter and interrogation of how we consume visual information in our…
Boy Harsher’s foray into filmmaking is a bit clunky, but The Runner certainly doesn’t lack for ambition or vibes. Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller have…
“This boy… and this girl… were never properly introduced to the world we live in.” So begins the dramatic voice-over of Nicholas Ray’s debut feature,…
Honorable Mention: After the WWII-set Phoenix (a production so emotionally taxing it seems to have severed the relationship between the director and his long-time collaborator…
Although it doesn’t quite stick the landing, See For Me is still a precise, no-frills genre exercise that makes the most of its limited budget and…
Someone should have buried The Gardener in the backyard. We’re in a veritable golden age of high-octane, low-budget DTV action flicks right now, with talented craftsmen like…
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 mentioned…
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 touchstones…
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. Drawing…
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 has…
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 June…
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 movie…
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 deftly…