Andrew Crump

Three films into his career, Pesce is batting below average: Last year, he dropped his inventive sophomore stunner, Piercing, and demonstrated range and precision not as evident in his hollow, unrepentantly nasty debut The Eyes of My Mother. With The Grudge, the worst proclivities of that movie override the sensibilities of Piercing and combine with studio horror’s “just play the hits” ethos, resulting in one of the year’s most unpleasant releases to date.

Don’t mistake Come to Daddy as anything less than unbridled, of course, but for such a staunchly bonkers movie, composure rules Timpson’s aesthetic. He maintains an impressive control over a narrative that, at face value, appears to be constantly spiraling out of control, but that’s part of his design.

The explosive fury of Bacurau’s slow-burn climax is a gratifying payoff to the film’s suspense, but without the deliberate measures taken to make the rest of the story count, it’d ring hollow.

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.

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.

Saint Frances gets specific, stays lighthearted, but hits like a ton of emotional bricks.

It’s a gorgeous, shattering film. It’s an unapologetically real film about a number of very real subjects, plot-agnostic but driven by character, consequence and compassion.

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.

The atmosphere that Franz and Fiala maintain isn’t a replacement for thoughtful writing, and their visual inventions are undone by the secrets that inspire them.

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.

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.

Kids deserve better entertainment than Dolittle. They deserve not to have their intellect insulted with half-assed celebrity vocal cameos and a plot that concludes not with a bang, but with a fart joke. Neither Gaghan, nor his ensemble, nor Universal have an excuse. Downey doesn’t either.

Avnet likely means well, just as Rokeach meant well. Three Christs needs more than a deep focus on the Christs themselves, and on the system that so utterly failed them. It needs to focus on Stone, and on the collision between ego and benevolence that led to The Three Christs of Ypsilanti’s birth. That should be the story.

Think of the film as an extended cousin of Too Many Cooks, where parody gives way to weirdness, which gives way to surrealism, which gives way to genuine horror by the end. Bonkers as the combination sounds, and it is unimpeachably bonkers, the effect of their marriage is hypnotic.

While the director clearly has a few tricks up his sleeve for hitting his viewers with the heebie jeebies, what he doesn’t have, at least for The Sonata, is a sense of how to weave those tricks into a unified, cohesive narrative.

The strength of ensemble’s performances can’t be overstated, especially that of Woodard and Hodge—she one of the greatest actors of her generation, he on the path to becoming one of the greats of his own.

Good as Marriage Story’s pieces are, they’re too finely curated: Baumbach rarely lets the film be as messy as it needs to be, hemming himself in with the threads of his limited perspective.

Slowly, agonizingly, over the course of two-and-a-half hours, the house collapses in a stream of Star Wars free association. At best, The Rise of Skywalker solidifies Ridley and Driver as movie stars. At worst, it ends this narrative not with a bang but with a recycled image from a better movie. If that isn’t proof that Disney considers this property more product than art, nothing is.

Little Joe could use a trim for better deployment of plot and unnerving atmosphere. No matter. Little Joe is a quirkily rattling movie, an off-kilter tonic during the year-end onslaught of movies proclaimed “important” by their studios, and what the film lacks in structure it makes up for in its eerie, cold singularity.

Scorsese’s gangster movies indulge the genre’s pleasures, of course, but in each of them—all seven of them—he’s looking for spirituality and for humanity. In The Irishman, he’s in self-reflection mode, glancing at his career-long search for God while pondering his own age.

It is intermittently a blast, particularly when Bale and Damon ham it up with each other, trading jabs and one-liners, and having childish slap fights in broad daylight as Miles’ saintly, patient wife Mollie (Caitriona Balfe) quietly observes. But when it isn’t a blast, Ford v Ferrari is politically muddled to the point of distraction.

Charlie’s Angels talks a good talk, but struggles to back up the talk with the drama necessary to make it worthwhile. At least Stewart, Scott, and Balinska are having a good time, but they’re so switched on, and Charlie’s Angels is so switched off, that it sometimes feels like they’re in a totally different movie than the one Banks is making. You may end up wishing that you were in that movie with them.

Lapid articulates Yoav’s increasingly fevered quest for the impossible through aesthetic fluidity: Whip pans and judicious use of saturated colors, couched foremost in the mustard-yellow, knee-length coat Emilie plucks from his wardrobe for Yoav at the beginning of the movie. It all reflects the movie’s rich and assertive style, a detached cool to hold the audience at the proper distance from Lapid’s narrative.

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.

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

Comprising hardcore and doom metal, à la Isis, Electric Wizard, and Doomriders, Bliss is more metal than most of the metal records released in the last five years. The substance beneath the slaughter is a happy bonus, and a reminder that even the ugliest horror movies can have more going on under the hood than one might think.

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

It’s chaos, but it’s controlled chaos (even if only just), and in the chaos there’s absolute joy.

Love, Antosha lays Yelchin’s immense spirit bare, but the film remains wanting for depth. Make no mistake: This is the definitive Encyclopedia of Anton Yelchin, a tome to chronicle the best of him. But there’s so much about him to learn, and so much breezed over to fit into a 90-minute running time, that Price’s study feels somewhat diffuse.

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

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

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.

This is neither a pleasant movie nor a pleasing movie, but it is made with high aesthetic value to offset its unrelenting pitilessness: It’s fastidiously constructed, as one should expect from a director of Kent’s talent, and ferociously acted by her leading trio of Aisling Franciosi, Baykali Ganambarr and Sam Claflin.

This isn’t a movie in search of a greater meaning. It just needs to be entertaining. But it does both, and better still, it bothers to be creative.

The movie doesn’t drag, but it’s a major drag all the same.

At its best, The Perfection is an homage to 1970s horror movies and 1980s thrillers, a glorious, multi-hewed mind screw.

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.

A hushed, unassuming, intimate movie to remind audiences of the power of cinema by interrogating the definition of cinema itself.

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.

What makes Body at Brighton Rock such good fun is understanding where Wendy is coming from, and connecting to the very specific engine that’s fueling her fear. The movie’s truth doesn’t disappoint, because the truth is that nature plays tricks on the mind.

Above all else, Birdman is tender, raucously funny and deeply tragic.

There’s some surprisingly compelling footage, played over the end credits, of real life Juggalos providing testimonials about what their community means to them, and in that a message about understanding the misunderstood.

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.

Like the best “food porn” movies, Ramen Shop is an expression of authentic passion, the kind fostered by abiding connections not simply to food but to the people, places and times food recalls.

With The Juniper Tree, [Keene] left behind an impeccable piece of cinema history as her legacy, waiting to be discovered by audiences denied the chance to experience it themselves.

The combined effect of Black Mother’s technique—Allah shot on both 16mm and HD—is dizzying to the point of overwhelming, but the discipline required to engage with it is rewarded by a singular moviegoing experience. As the mother births her baby, so does Allah birth new cinematic grammar.

Happy Death Day 2U makes deliberate moves away from horror, adding both science fiction and comedy to muddle the original mixture for better and also worse. For better: The film is even more of a gas than its predecessor. For worse: It’s not as much of a horror movie.

Under the Eiffel Tower is a functionally enjoyable film bookended by an opening and a conclusion both dogged by distrust in the audience’s reading comprehension.

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

Dunham’s filmmaking remains disciplined throughout, building pressure within that’s eventually released in explosive violence. That’s what the title promises, after all. But that promise doesn’t blunt the jolting effect of The Standoff at Sparrow Creek’s storytelling or the gutpunches dealt in its climax.

What Buffalo Boys lacks in originality it makes up for in spirit. There’s a verve in Wiluan’s direction, a sense of joy shaping his approach to the tried and true familial vengeance hook.

Pawlikowski leaves it to the viewer to determine for themselves the fate of his Cold War proxy parents, and to glean purpose from the film’s gaps in time, its reticence, and even its black-and-white palette. Married with the Academy ratio, the color scheme makes the film feel classic, but Pawlikowski’s desire to plumb his past makes it timeless.

Shoplifters is held up by the strength of its ensemble and Kore-eda’s gifts as a storyteller, which gain with every movie he makes—even in the same year.

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.

As the crimes of the deportation haunts Bisbee and its inhabitants, so, too, are we haunted by them through the filter of Greene’s lens. But that experience, the experience of being haunted, proves vital. Maybe it’s necessary to let history haunt us. If we don’t, we’ll never be able to move beyond it.

As delightful as relentless CGI monster mayhem is—and there’s plenty to go round as The House with a Clock in Its Walls rolls through its final act—it’s the lovely character work that makes the story memorable. Roth and his cast pack a surplus of exuberance into a children’s fantasy mold that’s by now grown musty.

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.

Arizona bathes its absurdist satire in the bleakest humor and takes a sober glance at the consequences of America’s worst modern economic calamity.

Like life itself, Hale County This Morning, This Evening doesn’t lend itself to immediate comprehension. It’s to Ross’ credit that his work remains so thoroughly accessible and engrossing regardless.

Crime + Punishment isn’t without hope, but it anchors that hope to the unflattering realities of American policing.

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

Yuasa doesn’t care much for substance, so beyond the film’s surface charms there’s not much to hang onto. But those surface charms are substance enough. Colorful, madcap, and surprisingly sweet, The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl is the best nocturnal romp you never had, and a dizzying reignition of rom-com formula.

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.

The greatest miracle of Eighth Grade is its warmth. The film reflects arguably the worst stretch of growing up in America’s education system, but it’s rarely if ever ugly. Instead, it’s compassionate, radiating retroactive kindness for the children we all were to soothe the adults we are now.

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.

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.

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.

If The Year of Spectacular Men makes any kind of statement, it’s that Madelyn and Zoey ought to work together more often. Put simply, they’re amazing, lively, sharp, snarky with a side of cheer—for the time being The Year of Spectacular Men feels like their gift to us, an unexpected blend of comedic tones and a perfectly bittersweet summertime respite.

As a showcase for its leads, it’s delightful. All it’s missing is a touch of honest-to-goodness gravity to keep the story anchored.

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.

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

Summer of 1993 does what movies do so well (and yet so rarely do), which is to let viewers see the world through the eyes of another.

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.

The blend of artistry and genre is breezy and dense at the same time, a film worth enjoying for its surface charms and studied for its deeply personal reflections on intimacy. You may delight in its lively, buoyant filmmaking, but you’ll be awed by the breadth of its insight.

With Revenge, Fargeat has waved a blistering middle finger at rape culture and rape culture’s enablers. Revenge isn’t hers alone. It’s womanhood’s, too.

Does the experience improve under the influence? Possibly. Then again, Yuasa’s work is effectively intoxicating on its own merits, squiggly and colorful, animation off-kilter enough to send you on a cinematic trip so long as you let it wash over you.

There are problems with Mrs. Hyde that have nothing whatsoever to do with Bozon’s puzzling creative choices, though for perspective’s sake, the problems are dwarfed by the choices.

It’s genre salad, and every ingredient is wilted at a moment in America where Kings’ historical makeup remains fresh.