Chase Hutchinson

All through the scattered experience, Page is a shining light. Every move he makes gives the film something greater that it is never able to grasp.

Hell Hole is a solidly gory, goofy little ride that cuts through any hiccups to get to the meat of a madcap indie monster movie.

There is much that could easily lose some people when they behold elements of its grand design, but for those willing to get on its wavelength, you’re in for a treat as beautiful to look at as it is unexpectedly haunting.

Jérémy Clapin’s Meanwhile on Earth is a mesmerizing work of science fiction with a magnificent performance by Megan Northman.

Oddity is another horror gem from writer-director Damian McCarthy with an enthralling performance by Carolyn Bracken.

My Spy: The Eternal City is an underwhelming action-comedy sequel that is best as a covert coming-of-age tale, but more frequently suffers as a grab-bag of tonality that abandons what helped My Spy succeed in the first place.

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.

Without going too far into detail, as the sudden swerve it makes is too delightful to dare give away, it takes a plunge into its own distinctly offbeat, frequently absurd, and ultimately melancholic vision.

If you’re willing to take the plunge, it’s a haunting experience. Whether you come up for air or retreat back into the woods, well, that’s another thing entirely.

It’s like a good theatrical production. It’s often charming and more than a little chaotic.

You get wrapped up in the whimsy of it all just before it all hits you like a truck, finding plenty of resonant emotional flashbacks that contextualize and deepen the experience just in time for the conclusion.

The film does pull out all the stops for the finale but, for nearly every moment it stands tall in this conclusion, it also stumbles and falls in the getting there.

While the more extreme moments of the film may capture the most attention on first watch and are remarkably well-executed, Potrykus deserves praise for how precisely he captures the depths of pain that come pouring out of people like the ash out of a firework.

Morrisa Maltz’s Jazzy is a gentle, impressionistic wonder that authentically captures growing up.

Robot Dreams is a beautifully animated look at life, friendship, and what it means to grow apart.

Along with his co-writer Bossi Baker, Erkman has made a distinctly eerie and sinister debut that succeeds at sneaking into the depths of your subconscious.

What makes The Damned so effective is how grounded it all is in the characters and their perception of the world.

I see dead people in this film, but their cause of death is simply boredom.

Though it assembles some of the right ingredients before laying them out before you, it never proceeds to arrange them in any particularly interesting or entertaining way.

It doesn’t deliver a knockout like some of Miike’s other films, but it still manages to beat all it has working against it into submission. One can only hope it manages to beat the odds again and find the audience it deserves.

Bionic is another sci-fi dud for Netflix, bringing nothing new to the genre and not much more to its action sequences.

It is a wholly uncompromising experience that dances with mirth and melancholy. Proving to be evocative in one moment and unrelentingly exhausting in the next, it’s as gorgeous to behold visually as it is hard to completely embrace thematically. And yet, if you abandon yourself to it by the end as one character says, you can catch glimpses of something spectacularly sublime in the vast journey that it takes on.

It’s incredibly effective and culminates in one of the best closing shots of any film to show at this year’s festival. Without ever once overplaying its hand, it ensures the smallest act of resistance and compassion hits like a train.

It's a remarkable, revolutionary work of art. As precisely focused and tightly constructed as it is expansive in its aspirations, it’s a rallying cry for the irreplaceable value of artistic expression in a world that will repress it at all costs.

It's a frequently fascinating and often moving film despite its many, often glaring, flaws.

Benjamin provides just the right balance of sincerity and snark to hold this dark action-comedy together. When combined with bloody good action choreography, the film mostly knocks any flaws aside.

It lacks the electricity of his past works but, as we come to see, the lifelessness of it all, is, in many regards, the point of the whole thing. It's about carrying on when nothing makes sense.

A lot is going on all at once, but little of it coheres into anything substantive, let alone actually memorable or meaningful.