Andrew Crump

There’s texture here, unnerving ambience as proof of Glass’ budding talents. But less isn’t always more, and while Saint Maud doesn’t need much, it simply doesn’t have enough to make an impression lasting beyond one second of terror.

The Killing of Two Lovers is remarkable to behold, but all the technique in the world can’t distract from the holes littering the production beyond cinematographer Oscar Ignacio Jiminez’s lens.

The film has an identity problem. It’s uncertain what it wants to be. This is too damn bad because its first mode, a parody of male self-obsession, is perfectly satisfying; the comedy makes us shift in our seats, but the shifting is pleasurable, complemented by well-timed gags and a mesmerizingly selfish performance from its leading man, Yannis Drakopoulos.

A movie like this shouldn’t be so ambivalent, much less so harsh on the eye.

Labaki’s filmmaking suggests uncertainty at best and lack of confidence at worst. She layers on the suffering too thick.

It’s well-intended, it’s heartfelt and in its small-scale fashion it’s surprisingly ambitious, but it’s also content to cheat its own premise and withhold its genre pleasures, which effectively undermines Barbara’s journey.

It’s the thought put into the writing that leads Promising Young Woman astray: The movie knows what it’s about, but waffles over how to be about it. The ferocity Mulligan funnels into her performance hints at the story that could’ve been—merciless, cool and vividly stylized. But her ruthlessness, her “no fucks to give” demeanor, isn’t matched by the picture surrounding her. She realizes her promise as Fennell struggles with her own.

Ostensibly, this is a movie about best friends and the exorcism that comes between them. Only the second part of the title lands.

Coming from a first-timer, Golden Exits might suggest promise. Coming from Perry, it nearly reads as self-satire, the epitome of overly dry and thoroughly hubristic indie filmmaking. Don’t let the indulgent chatter fool you. Here, Perry has nothing to say that’s worth listening to.

Maybe the film will squeeze a tear or two from your eye. What it won’t do is give you a reason to remember when, or why.

As an arrival, Undergods impresses, but what’s under the surface needs finessing.

For a movie about the inequities inherent in both parent/surrogate relationships and expecting father/expecting mother relationships, the stakes hover surprisingly low in the plot stratosphere.

Huda’s Salon uses strong thread to sew its dual narratives together, but “together” is all they are. They don’t cohere or complement each other save for providing two distinct paths into Abu-Assad’s exploration of Palestinian identity and life, contextualized in women’s experiences as members of a patriarchal society.

Edwin declines to make a choice between idiosyncrasy and action, and his work winds up feeling like a loosely related assembly of material instead of a finished film.

Layton’s failure is frustrating. American Animals is a rare thing, truth that’s legitimately stranger than fiction. Bereft of a cohesive structure, the movie loses purpose, and that rare, strange truth is lost in workaday heist tropes blended with workaday documentary portraiture.

The film should read like an epic. Instead, it reads like a boilerplate sports doc; the kind kept on constant rotation in ski resort taverns where they might catch diners’ attention for a minute or two while they wait on chili and beers.

This is Van Sant’s Dog Day Afternoon moment. Judged solely by Skarsgård’s scenes, Dead Man’s Wire makes for an insightful and tense portrait of its subject. But judged by the limits of its perspective, the film is narrow to the story’s detriment.

The Lost Arcade suffers not because it lacks an egalitarian heart, but because Vincent makes his arguments through a myopic lens.

Mustache does its job. It gives Ilyas catalysts for growth other than the cookie duster hanging out under his nose, and the writing invites us to laugh with him, not at him because it’s one thing to laugh and another thing to sneer.

The first third of Alien: Covenant is suitably gripping. The final third is wreathed in tension reminiscent of the film’s 1979 progenitor, Alien. The second third sandwiched in between these bookends is equally interminable and dumb, a garbage-level studio-prompted exercise in origin narrative, built to demystify intellectual property where mystification is a key factor in its success.

Greenland isn’t some self-insistently timely movie and it probably isn’t the movie we “need” right now. But it’s the movie we have, and its honest to goodness but unintended genre resonance makes it easy to embrace.

With In the Earth, Wheatley hits a brick wall, but he hits it hard enough that whether one sees the film as successful or not, the effort remains admirable.

Garai’s array of filmmaking techniques are impressive and haunting, breathing an unsettling melancholy into her script.

There’s a way to find the humor in life with mental illness. The Year Between, with exceptions, isn’t it.

It’s impossible to watch Bruckner’s adaptation without comparing it to Barker’s. Barker tapped into the darkest locus of human desire and expressed it on screen as shocking carnal violence. Bruckner sands down that perverted, forbidden lust into an accessible blueprint: Setup, kill, exposition, repeat.

A remarkable real-life, low-artifice spy thriller becomes unremarkable fiction.

As Wildling’s center, Powley keeps our attention in her orbit, and Böhm constructs a universe around her that’s worthy of her talent (if at times too murkily filmed for its own good). But the movie loses its thread 15 minutes or so into its running time.

The film’s cute, zingy, candy-coated tone is seductive enough, and both Hildebrand and Shipp are compelling in their roles. You will, in short, be entertained. But if Tragedy Girls’ subject matter is odious, its tacit, but perhaps accidental, endorsement of the very thing it means to send up is jaw-dropping.