Andrew Crump

All the components for bite are here, from unflattering character portraits to hideous amorality, but The Commune never clamps down quite as hard as you’d like it to. Your time won’t be wasted with the movie, but it won’t send you out of the theater scarred, either.

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.

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

We’re left with a prickly kind of harmony that blends mundanity with profundity. There’s no more perfect a note for a film as intelligent, compassionate, and complex as “My Happy Family” to end on than that.

The Red Turtle is poetry made cinema, an exquisite existential allegory that says everything without having to say anything at all.

The ultimate effect of the film’s hackneyed material is as debilitating as it is frustrating.

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.

Trimming the film’s manipulations and inessential qualities would only improve it, but judicious editing would leave very little meat on its bones.

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.

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.

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

It’s a ponderous work in every meaning of the term.

Wannabe shock comedies toe boundaries of decorum but don’t have the stones to cross them, which in a way is more off-putting than the alternative. For Hvam, Christensen, and Klown Forever, boundaries aren’t a problem, only substance, but if you’re looking for a moral or a message, then you’re looking at the wrong film.

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

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.

The film looks heavenly, often bathed in light, as if Qu wants nothing more than to assuage these women of their suffering by suggesting paradise. But the brightness is just a veneer. Beneath the surface, “Angels Wear White” is as bleak as they come.

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.

Before there was such a thing as a “Fellini” movie, “Variety Lights” established what that would look like as he moved up the ladder in Italy’s movie industry, through humor and melancholy.

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.

Son of the White Mare must be seen to be believed, but mostly it just needs to be seen.

What Tokyo Pop never allows is overcooked drama where the couple has to decide if they’re really in love, or if they’re just trying to hit it big. The film is genuine. It devoutly avoids putting on airs.

The great, unifying success across all ten shorts is Kieślowski’s representation of Poland, which is political, social, and personal all at once. Each movie is its own experiential encounter.