A straightforward romantic drama that gradually reveals itself to be about something else entirely, Copilot is a modest success for about half of its…
Otto Preminger’s career is frequently separated into two distinct halves — the early, studio-contracted work and his later films as a self-produced independent, tackling…
A Ghost Waits is a slight but impressive calling card of a film boasting two genuinely notable performances. An oddball, micro-budget supernatural rom-com, Adam Stovall’s…
Sator is a distinctive, genuinely novel and unsettling contribution to the horror genre. Made almost entirely by one person — writer/director/producer Jordan Graham also built…
Body Brokers is littered with fascinating parts, but never manages to pull it all together into a cohesive vision. There are at least four different…
Sacrifice is overly familiar, Lovecraftian knockoff material that’s a slog to get through even at a short 88 minutes. The legacy of H.P. Lovecraft looms…
Red Dot’s survivalist vision isn’t consistently executed, but there’s enough here to suggest Darborg is worth watching. There’s something appealingly primal about stranding movie…
A bizarre parable that doubles as a kind of fractured fairy tale, The North Wind is a grab bag of vaguely surrealist tropes surrounding…
Lapsis mines much of its dystopic power through appropriately small-scale world-building and clear-eyed rhetoric. Noah Hutton’s Lapsis is a genuine curiosity, a micro-budget sci-fi feature…
The Year Before the War begins with an impressive sequence shot; in closeup, workers methodically cut huge blocks of ice out of a frozen…
The Wanting Mare is a genuine CGI novelty, a delicate, low-key work of great sensitivity. More often than not, when one thinks of special effects…
Knocking, a psychological thriller of sorts that details one woman’s deteriorating mental state as she’s driven mad by mysterious noises emanating from the apartment…
The Night hints at building nuance into its familiar template, but ultimately jumbles familiar genre tropes to no discernible end. It’s never a good look…
In his 1978 book Orientalism, historian and cultural critic Edward Said writes: “Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is…
Bloody Hell boasts obvious talent both behind and in front of the camera, but is belabored by its stale tics and tonal indecision. As film…
Preparations is a major discovery, its distinct character recalling nothing less than the works of Abbas Kiarostami, Christian Petzold, and Krzysztof Kieślowski. Preparations to Be…
Atlantis is an unsettling, poignant study of the casual violence that both informs the past and estimates the future. With Atlantis, director Valentyn Vasyanovych (also…
Outside the Wire boasts enough requisite action fodder to keep things moving, but in failing to meaningfully develop any of its ideas, become little more…