Brianna Zigler

Eenie Meanie largely coasts on clichés, every brief high point deflated by its worldview.

Though Offerman buoys the film with terrifying aplomb, Sovereign is a missed opportunity to examine the cascading fallout from living in a country that fails its people and breeds violence.

The central conceit quickly feels like window dressing for a film that wants to be in a particular genre but hasn’t put in any real effort to fit there.

There is a better film somewhere in Bring Her Back, but it has instead been formatted into an unrewarding and unrelenting exercise in unpleasantness.

Though carried by a subtle and strenuous performance from Greer, Eric LaRue‘s intentionally unanswered questions do less to provoke than render the film a collage of well-meaning, half-finished sentiments.

If Opus has anything to say about celebrity, fandom, and the state of arts criticism, it’s both not much and not new, so vague and so unrealized that it’s difficult to even parse exactly what it is.

Egoyan’s film is at once stylish and slipshod, a film that is both gorgeously shot—haunting shadows, deep colors—and inelegant in its themes of sexual trauma and assault.

It’s kind of fun in just how predictable and boilerplate it all is, and The Gorge is never boring. But, frustratingly, it’s obvious that there is a better movie hidden somewhere within it.

In the end, A Complete Unknown neither meaningfully conveys Dylan’s mythology nor exposes him as human. There’s more fulfillment to be gained from listening to “The Very Best of Bob Dylan.”

Y2K should mark the beginning of Kyle Mooney’s film auteurism, but his funnier instincts and command of human vulnerability have been replaced by weak jokes, weak characters, and a weak storyline.

It’s no wonder why Schrader, an older artist whose life and career have been defined by a seemingly limitless series of controversies, took to bringing to the screen the story of Leonard Fife.

The dueling personas of Jolie and Callas adds a dimension of time-spanning kinship to Maria that it might not have had if it had starred an actress with less publicized personal baggage. Saddled with the pasts of two world-renowned stars, Maria is more like an emblem of the burden of fame than a dissection of the humanity at its core.

There are worse and more mind-numbing portrayals of domestic abuse out there, but is it helpful to offer up a pipe dream, double-acting as a trauma fantasy for eager voyeurs?

Twisters is, at best, pretty fun—a decidedly breezy two hours. It has thrills, and chills, and Glen Powell doing his darndest to bring the concept of “movie star” back into the year 2024.

Arcadian isn’t a time-waster, but its execution is too rote and unimaginative to warrant its existence as another addition to our post-apocalypse glut.

A frequently heartstring-tugging inspirational dog movie that does little to excel beyond acceptability yet manages to not be a complete drag to watch.

Land of Bad is middle-of-the-road war movie gobbledygook.

This inane new Statham vehicle, The Beekeeper—directed by Suicide Squad auteur David Ayer and written by Expend4bles’ Kurt Wimmer—manages to be moderately stimulating, all things considered, though it suffers from the filmmakers’ inability to allow it to be as inane as it clearly should be.

The premise is also genuinely neat, a fun, breezy little 90-minute high-concept that unfortunately sounds more propulsive and invigorating than it really is.

I found myself undeniably charmed by a lingering warmth in the coldness of Fingernails, no doubt helped along by the performances of Buckley and Ahmed.

The dreaminess, a clear evocation of Fellini, feels well-worn and contrived instead of exciting, coasting on aesthetics.

The concept behind the film is an amusing, if obvious, one-note gag stretched out to nearly two hours, and not a gag that’s particularly novel or one that offers Larraín much to expand upon. As a would-be political satire and a vampire film, El Conde simply doesn’t have much (sorry, sorry, I know) bite.

Strays is bad, but it’s not offensively so—and it’s certainly better and more watchable than something like Cocaine Bear (a low bar to cross, albeit).

For a directorial debut, Aloners showcases Hong Sung-eun as an exciting new voice—hopefully next go around she’ll give us a little more to chew on.

There’s a reason that Satter knew Winner’s transcript would succeed as a play, but she brings very little that’s new and exciting as a film director of that same narrative.

Victim/Suspect manages to be at once fascinating, improperly focused and somewhat redundant.

Fool’s Paradise doesn’t come close to clearing the self-imposed hurdle of matching a Chaplin classic or an Ashby satire. But it does sometimes work as a breezy comedy and a satire-lite of vacuous Hollywood, articulated tenfold by the modern Superhero Franchise Industrial Complex.

It’s not willing to be goofy and gonzo enough for the inanity of its concept, not cool enough for the slick fight scenes it wants to impress you with, and not worthy enough of Cage as Dracula (the real star of this show).

Inside‘s concept holds creative possibility, yes, but without much, if any, applied, it’s just a guy stuck in an apartment for 105 minutes, going through various stages of disbelief, acceptance, mania, determination and setback as days, weeks and months go by, and desperation becomes more of a necessity than a last resort.

Since the quality of documentaries tends to hinge on how compelling its subject matter is, A House Made of Splinters is further complicated by the fact that Wilmont’s filmmaking is largely perfunctory. Thus its draw leans almost entirely on the children and their tattered lives. In this way it does feel a touch exploitative, even if the goal is to shine light on an overlooked, ongoing tragedy.

Bones and All is a heart-tugging portrait of wayward spirits searching for belonging that deadens the genre of cannibal horror into digestible, prestige-glossy arthouse.

In reality, Triangle of Sadness is neither as smart nor as interesting as it clearly thinks it is.

While Mother Schmuckers may hit a sweet spot for fans of the delightfully vulgar and distasteful, it reads mostly as a film aiming only to provoke.

As is, Don’t Look Up is an exhausting and meandering “What if? But also, what now?” If the world really is going to end in my lifetime, these were 145 minutes that I’m never getting back.

Jones suffuses slow-burn tension, disturbing visual elements and murky folk horror into a film that’s foundation rests on creeping uncertainties—making The Feast pleasantly obscure and occasionally quite upsetting.

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain can’t quite live up to its magnetic subject, but it’s still a warm celebration of a renegade artist and revolutionary forbearer of the funny cat video.

Antlers is a film that, not unlike most of its ilk, wants to be an overstuffed analogy for hot-button issues first, and a horror film second. Unfortunately, it can’t seem to get either right.

Vortex, while visually captivating, only functions as a window through which to look at death detached from the beauty of life.