Andrew Crump

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.

Consider The Forever Purge as the “well, well, well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions” meme as a horror film.

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

The drama rests on their efforts to claim self-agency that the circumstances of their success have accidentally denied them. The effect of the message and the medium is trim and unsparing; the sendoff is surprisingly uplifting. Altogether, the package is remarkable.

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

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.

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.

Ultimately it’s very little about football. It’s about class. This is a theme worthy of a spotlight, too — but 12 Mighty Orphans isn’t the place for it, or it shouldn’t be.

Noyer needs to go back to the drawing board. Even Alexis’ disability comes in a distant second to buckets of guts. His talent for making a mess is obvious. The rest leaves a few too many notes to be desired.

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.

Riders of Justice ties together gun fights seamlessly with melancholy and masculinity, putting them on similar footing without one gobbling up the others. The effect is complimentary. Remove one theme and the others crumble. Jensen quietly, and nearly constantly, adjusts his filmmaking to suit varying tones, softening for moments where the subject is human suffering and then hardening around muscular elements

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

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.

We all have our own regrets and sins to reconcile with. The Banishing reminds us that sometimes we’re forced to answer for the sins of others, too.

Rich filmmaking, from assured camerawork to tactile set decoration, is the film’s basis. But richer exploration of theme and spiritual belief is its design. Things Heard & Seen isn’t elevated. It’s just mature, wonderfully made, and, whether dead or alive, human.

Ultimately the film resembles cosplay with an expansive budget. It took 20 years and change for a new Mortal Kombat movie to get a green light. Maybe they should’ve waited a few years longer.

Imagine spending an hour and a half or so watching a film that, the minute the credits roll, dissolves from the mind like cotton candy in hot water. That’s Vanquish. Nothing that happens throughout its narrative happens for any good reason, other than the plot dictates it must for the sake of limping to the next scene.

But there’s so much done wrong as the film tries to be funny that when it is funny, the funniness goes down like a bitter pill: Why can’t it be good all the time?

Yes, This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection is constitutionally sad. It’s also angry, restrained, abandoned, exuberant when cracks open between its downward facing emotions, and, above all else, impeccably constructed.

First-time feature helmer Grabinski firmly steers his script away from sticking in one mode or another: It’s neither purely scary, nor purely tense, nor purely hilarious, but instead most or all of these at once, producing a uniquely unnerving tone where shortness of breath in one moment instantaneously gives way to cackles in the next.

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.

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.

Chaos Walking feels like a condensement of Ness’ trilogy of books instead of a straightforward translation of the first, and consequently there’s too much that needs to happen in too slim a running time, which leaves little space for making the movie’s conflicts matter.

Similar to how the characters are there to serve Anthony, Colman, Gatiss, Sewell and Poots are there to serve Hopkins. The stage belongs to him. What he does with it is something special, an unmissable performance from an actor with a filmography loaded with them.

The Mauritanian plays by the numbers, hitting courtroom conspiracy drama beats dutifully but without any urgency. From the start, everyone on every side of the court is running out of time, and hitting their heads on brick walls of government silence, which, though drawn from real life, remains a well-worn genre cliché played too heavily by Macdonald’s direction.

Frankly, Earwig and the Witch looks ghastly enough that storytelling merit doesn’t even matter. It’s a movie almost too ugly to consider beyond the surface.

It’s less a story and more a fragile white male provocation, and it’s repulsive.

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.