Chase Hutchinson

It’s a scalpel of a film that cuts into how stacked the deck is and how solidarity — or the lack of it — can determine whether you survive unscathed.

Never could the story be described as a series of sketches haphazardly stitched together as many comedies can fall into being. It looks and feels like a drama that is coming apart at the seams as Robinson careens his way through it.

The result is a film that’s not just funny, skewering so much of the lazy yet still effective tropes of so much of true crime, but also a wake-up call for the genre.

Through it all, Collias is so confident and assured that it feels like this is her fiftieth leading role instead of her first.

It’s not only properly unsettling, making great use of darkness and sound, but also becomes a quietly poetic reflection on loss when you least expect it.

It’s a breathtakingly melancholic film infused with mourning, journeying its way through subtly painful yet often poetic conversations about searching for something lost that may never be found. That only makes all the discoveries it makes that much more stunning to behold.

Yet for all the sadness at the core of its story, “Clarissa” is captivating in how honestly and openly it confronts that emotion.

Expansive yet focused, it is a work that is dense in terms of its ideas while also making room for more delicate emotional notes when you least expect it to.

Through it all, Scott gives one of the year’s best performances, creating life in small moments.

One scene cuts right to the next, eschewing a typical progression of shots or exposition to instead just let us observe the little details. It creates an arresting experience that feels as if we are merely witnessing memories fading into each other as Sandra tries to find solace amid her growing sadness.

A magnificent work of minimalism, the film is about these minute moments just as it’s about the most existential parts of life.

Josh is flying solo this time, but Marty Supreme shows he’s capable of achieving a greatness that’s all his own. While brief plot elements weigh the film down, Safide defies gravity even as Marty cannot.

It’s faithful to the book without being overly devout, asking a multitude of deeper, more probing questions while reflecting on the same unsettling and existentialist ones that the book did. By the time it closes with its unexpectedly mournful yet gently searing final frames, reinterpreting and expanding on the enduring source material one final time, it names all that Camus did not.

This is a film where the trappings of the procedural plot matter infinitely less than the moments that come when you glimpse the visually beautiful yet bleak pit into which Harker is going to fall.

The film may have begun with a joke on one man, but with the cutthroat world we’re increasingly building for ourselves, it may soon be on all of us.

Glander’s debut has vibes to spare, but he never coasts on them even as Billy coasts around the Florida landscapes. In the end, he delivers a full meal of a film that, like the giant hot dog we see in one shot in the middle, is a mesmerizing work of art worth taking a big bite out of. It will never be to all tastes, but to those who find themselves on its wavelength, it couldn’t be sweeter.

Seo excavates universal truths that transcend all generational and cultural divides. The many geographical, social and emotional pains these young people are grappling with are ones everyone faces down. As they find ways to fight this, coming to realize all the many ways they may not be so easily able to, there is something both genuinely heartfelt yet quietly haunting about it.

Unabashedly silly, yet effectively sincere, it is a film that grows on you.

Etzler wields the film’s urgent satire like a scalpel, precisely cutting away at all the lies we so easily find ourselves telling that mask the darker truths about who we are.

It all makes for a clever, measured, mirthful, and joyous film with the real potential to be a modern monster movie classic whose legs could easily see it sprinting into being a routine rewatch every single year.

The cruelty at the core of this vivacious vampiric farce is blended up with sharp yet silly gallows humor, ensuring the grim absurdities Larraín gracefully teases out increasingly take flight even as he continually drags us into gruesome and gory depths.

It is via a willingness to push beyond the headlines and discover something more about humanity that 2nd Chance reveals a deeper sense of the truth behind its scandalous story.

Splitsville goes off the rails in increasingly entertaining fashion, with every single part offering something new and unpredictable. It’s a film of well-crafted jokes that are based in character and a willingness to more than go for broke when needed.

Whether you can stomach it enough to make it all the way will depend on the viewer, but Talk To Me has plenty that promises to capture the souls of horror sickos looking for a sinister spectacle.

Throughout all of it, Ebrahimi gives a performance that, even in immense isolation, tells a whole story on its own and leaves a lingering impression long after the film itself comes to a close.

What makes The Stranger work is how this all creates an experience that feels as though the two men have become almost doomed to a life where they will aimlessly wander in what feels like an Australian purgatory. Whether they ever manage to escape and uncover some sort of closure is irrelevant to the growing rot that threatens to consume their souls no matter what they do.

There is a wonderfully withering sense of humor in how American Fiction explores this as all of the conversations Monk begins to have around the book he wrote as a joke sees it spiraling out of his control.

After the Bite could initially be mistaken for just another part of a trajectory of movies that has become defined by this trend-chasing rather than something more. However, if you begin to look closer, you’ll discover a measured reflection on our relationship to both the predator of the deep and the habitat that has come under threat.