Carson Lund

Its bid for social correctness does nothing to make the juvenile and numbing fixation on brutality any more palatable.

Familiar as its art/life paralleling may be, it's all fueled by a filmmaker with an intimate relationship to his subject matter.

If the film is meant only as a pulpy genre exercise, Matt Shakman's competence in various modes actually works to strip it of any sense of coherent vision.

What’s so fascinating about the world of On Cinema is the way each creative outgrowth expands and deepens the lore, and Mister America’s universe-specific innovations renders the film indispensable in context.

From its first draw of blood onward, it bolts down a foreseeable slasher-movie trajectory, laying on thick the dramatic irony while constantly inventing new reasons to punish its characters for old iniquities.

The film finds the actors' performance deficiencies functioning less as signs of authentic teenage behavior than as an incompetent carrier of plot.

The film is like a landlocked Bergman chamber drama divested of any ambivalence regarding human relationships.

The cinematographic approach of the film suggests some unholy hybrid of the aesthetic and genre indulgences of Michael Bay and the hyper-literalist plot construction of Christopher Nolan.

Its anodyne tastefulness effectively lumps it into a big vat of likeminded Sundance-or-SXSW-endorsed offerings.

For all the thematic emphasis the script ultimately places on the allegedly thick bonds among these men, it's surprising how often they communicate solely through exposition.

Navajo Joe plays more like a ’50s B western in its fluid pacing, compact narrative construction, and hokey emphasis on star power than it does the kinds of sprawling genre re-workings common to its era.

Never once does it project an intuitive understanding of how humans would behave or react in the midst of such a shattering misfortune.

Adam Rifkin's documentary convincingly portrays the sense of community fostered by Giuseppe Andrews's crazed passion.

That the film adheres, upon close scrutiny, to the rough shape of a classical romantic tragedy—a seemingly intuitively understandable genre—only confirms the extreme degree to which Schanalec’s idiosyncratic manner of storytelling skirts and frustrates expectations.

The film is a record of everyday spaces and the emotionally charged human dramas that pass through them.

The film is greater in its confrontational force than the sum of a dozen festival breakthroughs lauded for their fearlessness.

This intimate found-footage memoir is driven by a frantic internal monologue that will feel painfully familiar to many cinephiles in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The film’s tonal and situational shapeshifting doesn’t go to the surrealist lengths of Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, but James Vaughan similarly indulges in burlesquing upper-middle-class complacency.