Brianna Zigler

Father Mother Sister Brother depicts with earnest melancholy the things taken for granted in life that don’t become real until after death, but its stiffness keeps it from being a work of true emotional significance.

Sentimental Value successfully synthesizes metaphor and nuanced character drama to convey the way suffering ripples outward—even if it’s hard to shake the feeling that, like its protagonist, it should let us in a little deeper.

Byrne excels at evoking pain and exhaustion, but also selfish ambivalence, and the kind of frazzled mother character she played in the Insidious franchise is put to far better use by Bronstein.

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

The profound depth of feeling generated by Brie and Franco in the midst of this genre film, one perhaps unattainable if they weren’t also married in real life, gives Together a real shot as the greatest romance of the year.

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.

Everything’s Going To Be Great tries to tackle ideas related to perceptions of success, acceptance, family, religion, love, homosexuality, and probably some other things thrown in there too. But there is no commitment to any of them.

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

Aside from these weaker moments, April is overall equal parts disturbing and enthralling, arresting and miserable; a gorgeous slow-burn pressure cooker that culminates in a quiet condemnation of the powers complicit in women’s suffering while offering no catharsis.

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.

Warfare is impressive, efficiently tense filmmaking.

The beats become terribly repetitive even when the fight choreography is at times satisfying, and the R-rating at least allows for some CGI blood spurts. But in spite of the dreary tedium, there are moments of genuine levity that shine through the gloom, be they intentional or not.

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.

A pulse-pounding, high concept bio-drama, Last Breath is a commendable technical feat, though its melodrama falls short.

Old Guy, as is, is just a film about an old guy, free of complexity or nuance, coasting towards its formulaic conclusion.

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.

You’re Cordially Invited is a rigorously unoriginal and uncreative film, in compliance with the flat mundanity of content that the streaming giants want their audiences to bask in.

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.”

It’s Pamela Anderson’s deceptively fragile performance that shoulders The Last Showgirl, her breathy, girlish rasp the perfect match for Shelly’s fluttery chatterbox personality. She is captivating, fully dissolved in the character, and it’s evident the extent to which Anderson is injecting her performance with her own complicated feelings towards aging, success, and spectatorship.

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.

None of the actors do much with the uninspired material, but perhaps Baccarin is the most enjoyable to watch as she grumbles in monotone about how she wants to kill herself and handily espouses monster factoids from her diligent research as a former Caltech professor.

Small Things Like These instead functions as a parable about how minor acts of kindness can be the strongest defense against powerlessness in the face of corruption. It’s a moral poignant in its simplicity, if also a bit lacking in how utterly uncomplicated and even expected it is.

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.

We Live In Time’s worst sin is making its thin characters so damn boring. They’re so likable and sweet, even their flaws are forgivable.

The Shrouds might not be Cronenberg’s most accessible or cohesive film, but it’s just as muddled as the process of coping with mortality in a world where we are pulled steadily further from what makes us human.

There is no simple catharsis to reckoning the horrors of the past with the eases of the present day; all you can do is choose how to live with it, and Eisenberg’s refusal to wrap his film in a neat little bow elevates his sophomore film into something almost as difficult as its subject material.