Andrew Crump

Tramps is a minor effort loaded with small pleasures, but tallied together, those small pleasures add up to one great movie.

Their Finest is a joy to watch, if not for Scherfig’s direction than for Arterton’s leading performance, a mixture of affronted gumption, feminine stoicism and vulnerability that adds up to towering portraiture.

Guided by Fabietto, the movie takes its time. It watches. It breathes. It captures life with a clarity even Sorrentino’s best efforts haven’t quite—which makes it his best effort to date.

The power of Fouéré’s performance echoes across the film to its gruesome, tragic ending – further supporting evidence of the past’s grip strength on people of any generation.

Chronicles of a Wandering Saint is wry with a side of quirk, unblinking in facing its subject matter head-on while refusing to pull punches; it isn’t without mercy, either.

Most of all, the chance to spend 90 or so minutes in Fonda’s orbit offers a welcome reminder of what cancellation actually means. For her, and for F.T.A., it means silence. Bravo to the folks responsible for putting the film under a spotlight at a moment where a lesson in genuine cancellation is so desperately needed.

This Is Congo has a point to prove and a righteous fury with which to prove it. But it’s focused and precise, which makes the sheer breadth of context required to understand it much easier to digest.

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

What makes the movie such a welcome surprise is Bonello’s creativity: Digging back nearly 60 years to trace an arc of trauma inherited through French colonialism takes as much chutzpah as imagination, the latter seen here mostly in the form of atmospheric horror homage.

There’s something to be said about humbly funded productions that achieve high aesthetic standards despite a relative lack of dough: When I Consume You packs an emotional wallop and looks stunning while spending peanuts compared to the average studio horror product.

A sobering, beautiful movie that’ll haunt you for weeks after watching it.

Undoubtedly, filmmakers like O’Connor wish to honor their subjects instead of idly speculating. Emily performs that complicated maneuver with casual ease, proving that for the right kind of movies, actors make the best kind of directors.

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.

We all look for magic in the world around us, and when we do the world routinely lets us down. Movies like this remind us that there’s magic, and life, in art—and perhaps especially in animation.

Simó “gets” Buñuel’s drives, and his animation lends the story a layer of romanticism while emphasizing that talent isn’t a hall pass. Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles treats genius as a knottier idea. Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan is a masterpiece, sure, but “masterpiece” takes on layers of new meaning once we see how the sausage is made.

Though A Couple is [Wiseman's] first narrative feature in 20 years, the narrative structure documents history by fashioning Sophia’s diaries and letters as a performance.

Hara marries biography to observational and slapstick humor, plus a healthy dose of supernatural rumblings, and in so doing produces something altogether fascinating and endlessly entertaining.

Beast plays with enough restraint to sustain our doubts for most of its duration, its gentle and often lovely filmmaking lulling us toward false certainties about its underlying inhumanity.

Wild Indian doesn’t have answers. There aren’t any. Instead, there are experiences, and Corbine Jr. captures his protagonists’ personal transformations with steeled honesty.

Coppola pours sweet foam over a bitter cup. The heart of the film is darkness, the exterior exuberance, and taken together they make for piquant viewing.

Fearsome and fearless at the same time, Palm Trees and Power Lines practically dares viewers to watch what’s happening on screen without flinching.

A story about drug addiction, corrupt authorities, and environmental collapse sounds grim on paper and plays grim on screen, but Unicorn Wars is more than “grim.” It’s deranged.

It’s a film about pettiness couched in maturity, and a brilliantly merciless take on the comedy of manners.

Buried under Yannick’s aggression and chafed emotions, he’s wanting for the basic need of being understood. This side of Yannick enhances Dupieux’s critique with a casual observation: Art is freeing, and without it, we’re doomed to lonesome misery.

It’s a remarkable picture of inbound focus and outbound ambitions.

The film’s vistas are beautiful and Matthews’s aim, high, but those aspirations are not fully realized in what feels like a first draft attempt at brushing Western customs with textures drawn from a South African palette.

The film’s abundance of tenderness and lack of cringe laughs, save for that opening sex scene, lets it stand out from its feel-bad comedy peers.

Zengel is a fresh spark in an otherwise old-fashioned production, but old-fashioned here is a compliment. News of the World has no interest in subverting or updating classic Western formulas: It is content with its function as a handsomely-made studio picture, built ostensibly around Hanks but with plenty of room for its young star to make her mark.

The Square’s contrast between categories of morality is peak Östlund. There’s no clearly defined gauge for goodness or badness here, just a palette of gray ethical relativism to offset the film’s superior construction.

When a horror movie goes out of its way to make its viewers feel as terrible as “In My Mother’s Skin” does, then that movie might just as well make feeling terrible worth it. Dagatan’s eye for gnarly practical and CG effects is buttressed by solid visual sensibilities, occasionally hamstrung by stray washed-out nighttime sequences, and wicked morality.

Hagazussa is further distinguished through a patina derived from David Lynch and Panos Cosmatos—slow, deliberate, perpetually unsettling. The film takes its time, but it drags the viewer along the way toward a mind-shattering oblivion.

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.

The Death of Dick Long’s central miracle is that, disgusting as its big reveal is, Scheinert’s direction is fundamentally compassionate.

You can argue that Mister Organ is a movie about Ferrier’s folly, though that would be most unkind. The better argument is that Mister Organ is a movie about hubris as the Achilles’ heel of all men like Organ, and yes, about the perils of sticking your nose where you oughtn’t.

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

Syms packs The African Desperate with pleasing ingenuity that facilitates its complex perspective; this is a film that must be sat with to fully appreciate.

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.

Unlike Bliss, which has a cogent intention pushing it forward, VFW plays slapdash, which admittedly fits the film’s grimy aesthetic, a delirious theme park ride. Maybe that’s all a horror movie needs to be to be worth watching, but Begos can do more than douse a set with viscera, even if VFW doesn’t need “more” to justify itself.

Scales is a grim movie as much as it’s a gorgeous one. It isn’t without hope, but hope is in short supply, on land and underwater.

There’s a long pedigree for Casarosa, Andrews and Jones to live up to. Mostly what they manage is sweetness, and so sweetness must suffice. A little more body would have been better.

Proxima is a well-considered story about the cost of ambition, intimate in contrast with its scope, and frankly a great depiction of what it’s like to be the kid caught between parents and careers.

What Keeps You Alive’s forthright quality feels refreshing, and Minihan’s craft is a major plus, too.

Theo Who Lived is a cross-pollination of performance art and self-purging, a cleansing act that allows Curtis to face the demons that still torment him today from within the safety of a film production.

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.

[Chon's] work is haunting and flirts with delirium, but at all times feels urgently alive.

All My Friends Hate Me digs out a special niche between cringe comedy and horror, as if Stourton, Palmer and director Andrew Gaynord welded an EC Comics plot to an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

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

Alien takes the long way around the barn to get from its creator’s fundamental psychic “stuff” to the genre classic it is today; Memory: The Origins of Alien, dissects the journey from concept to conception in microscopic detail, and w

Sisu communicates the basics without glossing over the record, and best of all without taking up time better spent liquifying bad guys.

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.

Trump plays no part in Rachel Dretzin’s Far from the Tree, a documentary distilled from Andrew Solomon’s nonfiction novel of the same name, but the film rebukes his cruelty regardless by doing what cinema does so well: highlighting humanity.

It takes a shock to the system to draw honesty out of an influencer, and Rotting in the Sun is absolutely a shocker. But rooting himself in the fabrication-friendly space of social media leads Silva, and his film, toward an earnestness that outmatches even his best work to date.

What’s special about Humanist is how Louis-Seize maintains an easygoing atmosphere despite the heavy material, and despite the determined stillness of Shawn Pavlin’s photography.

1922 is a ghastly slow burner, not the kind where nothing happens until the last ten minutes, but rather the kind that layers minor incident upon minor incident until they tally up to something major.

Shujun’s script, co-written with Yu Hua and Kang, eschews any viewer hand-holding, keeping its messages and themes backgrounded; if there is a greater context for the film’s plot, perhaps it lies in its depiction of law enforcement in mainland China, and the toll police work takes on the people conducting it, though Western critics lacking background in contemporary Chinese social and political mores can at best only speculate at best.

Jethica is impressive as a feat of economy—there’s a lot of movie packed into that 70 minutes—and miraculous as an act of empathy rolled up in a spooky, constitutionally American ghost fable, where the lost souls wandering the shoulder of far-flung highways may really be that, and where a simple traffic sign gains new meaning contextualized with Ohs’ thoughts on death: “Pass with care.”

Color Out of Space feels shaggy at the edges but so rich within them that the flaws of the DIY aesthetic matter less than the merits of Stanley’s perspective.

Mohawk is exciting on its own merit. Seen as a piece of Geoghegan’s growing filmography, it’s positively thrilling, a great extension of its author’s fascinations.

Julia, with all of its intimate, personal and professional accounts of her character and her rise to fame, is an interesting movie: Thoroughly enjoyable, brimming with things to say, constructed in a manner that ducks pretense for relatability.

If you, like critics, consider Coogan selfish or asinine, the film will validate that view, but for a purpose, and through the sharpest of organic comedy.

Asako I & II is an easygoing movie, at least if the film’s exterior is taken at its words. Under the hood, it’s roiling.

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.

Femme acknowledges its tropes and clichés; the film never soft-shoes the important part they play in its structure. What it does with them, though, feels fresh. Revenge is often ill-advised, even nihilistic. Femme’s revenge is a stamped guarantee of self-destruction.

It’s the most awkward family TV show you’ve ever seen, offset by a never-ending barrage of gags squeezed off with such a consistent rate of fire that keeping up is impossible. But there’s a silver lining: Each is hilarious.

It’s what we don’t see, at least not in full, that makes the film scare so effectively. Bertino holds his monster in reserve, conceding its presence through brief and mostly obscured glimpses of its shape.

Duvall dovetails the seasonal pap with her characters’ pain, treating it like ointment for their mellowing emotional stings. The message isn’t just about liking Christmas. The message is that everybody deserves a Christmas movie.

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.

If Atkinson’s presentation is just a hair above “competent,” it does the job of exposing the corroded heart of American policing.

Newman has pretty serious filmmaking chops: She shoots action cleanly, coherently, with an eye for the poetry of a well-executed suplex and the brutality of a back alley brawl. Her strongest work, though, is seen in her characters and in her lead.

At its best The First Purge functions like a much-reduced Purge movie retread. It’s not that it’s bad, really. It’s that we’ve seen this before.

It’s her unstoppability, her tireless drive to see through the work she believes needs doing in the field of sexual enlightenment that gives Ask Dr. Ruth real urgency, lifting what’d be an otherwise breezy character portrait to near essential levels.

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 Third Murder may not be Kore-eda’s best work, but the film proves a satisfying challenge, a complex exploration of sin and righteousness in an amoral world.

Duplass and Morales play their parts with honesty and grace; they write those parts and the drama between them with straightforward understanding of the complications of remote associations, and the total package is then presented straightforwardly. There’s no other way for screenlife to present itself. But the film loses nothing in that straightforwardness, neither authenticity nor humanity nor Morales’ appeal as an actress-turned-multihyphenate.

Burns conjures horror so vivid and tactile that at any time it feels like it might leap off of the screen and into our own imaginations or, worse, our own lives.

Ghost Stories’ failure to see its established ideas through to the end doesn’t totally negate the viewing experience. Each segment remains effectively chilling in a vacuum where the movie’s climax doesn’t exist.

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.

Small Town Crime doesn’t give us much to hang onto apart from its casting, and from its experiential beer-stained, cigarette-tainted atmosphere.

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 China Hustle handily clarifies opaque topics and moves like a bullet, but the bullet catches us right in the gut. By the time the film ends you’ll wish you could go back to being ignorant again.

Rather than clang with the innate savagery of the werewolf niche, Cummings’ command over his material gives the film a certain freshness. He tames the monster in the man so that the man is all that’s left, for better and for worse.

Dour as Paris appears through Lubtchansky’s lens, Garrel’s filmmaking is dexterous enough that A Faithful Man feels merry all the same.

Pulling focus from what is essential to The Legend of Ochi, from acting to artifice, throws the experience into haze–and not the fantasy kind, either, but the distended, stumbling kind that lets the pace go limp as the themes go slack. It’s to Saxon’s great credit as a visionary that The Legend of Ochi justifies the experience anyway, on the strength of its rare craftsmanship alone.

The realness Tran weaves into his story is welcome, but the smart filmmaking is what makes The Paper Tigers a delight from start to finish.

Run gives its dual leads a slim window for making first impressions and finding bases for their roles, which makes their performances and Chaganty’s direction doubly impressive.

No Man of God has a purpose: The truth. This isn’t a Ted Bundy movie, but rather a movie about Ted Bundy.

Gaia is a weird damn movie, but Bouwer’s filmmaking centers the weirdness so well that once it subsides, we remain assured that we’re on firm ground.

More than a documentary, the film is an exposé on the world of global capitalism’s callousness that handily demonstrates their inhumanity.

Ultimately, fans of the previous two films will get all they crave from The Trip to Spain, which feels like something of a rarity in franchising: These movies have yet to fizzle out and lose their appeal or run out of creative space to explore.

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

It’s often said that going into business with family is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea, but Clara’s Ghost provides an exception to this particular rule.

The Tiger Hunter isn’t exactly the most woke comic effort you’ll see in 2017, but there’s a particular pleasure taken in watching Khan pick apart our beloved national fable through a South Asian lens, even though that lens indulges a traditional and long-expired style of racial profiling.

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.

Young Ahmed isn’t the affront to taste people feared it would be. But its lack of genuine depth feels like an offense unto itself.

There are reasons we enjoy the adrenaline blast horror movies give us. Scare Me, which should be essential viewing as the Halloween season dawns, understands those reasons well and celebrates them with enough laughs and gasps to leave viewers choking.

Zlokovic’s film misses the point of celebratory tongue-in-cheek referentialism, not to the point where the horror cinema gods will force reassessment of The Babadook’s status as a contemporary classic, but enough to cheapen everything of merit about Appendage.

Ozon’s film grafts aesthetic pleasures with danger, and gets closer to the core of teenage romance as a payoff.

It’s exciting as a raw, provocative, and vividly realized cinema of sensation. Wood doesn’t invite us to observe White Girl so much as she invites us to involve ourselves in its drama.