Christian Gallichio

Flight Risk is never as campy as it should be.

The exploration of a survivor and their child navigating post-Soviet Poland is, on the surface, compelling, but Treasure doesn’t seem capable of threading the needle between a micro portrait of generational trauma and macro, collective trauma that is omnipresent throughout Poland in this era.

When the film firmly goes off the rails in the second act, [Cronenberg] still showcases an ability to play up tension as the four children hunt each other in the expansive mansion. In isolation, the bifurcation works but, taken together, it suggests an underbaked concept that was never fully realized and, alternatively, a slasher that never makes its characters feel human.

The film, then, is a useful primer for historicizing and contextualizing the relationship between methods of social control and the rise of policing, both as an unchecked institution and a term associated with the history of the United States. One just wishes the film would slow down every once in a while.

The Goldfinger isn’t per se bad. It’s consistently watchable, Lau and Leung are capable actors, and the narrative––even if standardized––is interesting. But this is perfunctory in a way Infernal Affairs never was.

Only time will tell if The Beanie Bubble represents the final dying gasp or merely the end of first-wave product-driven narratives. But, like Beanie Babies themselves, one hopes that this bubble will burst sooner rather than later.

In digging up what seems to be his own personal history, Honoré doesn’t trust the audience fully to fill in those silences.

Paint is a truly strange film that is never the full-on comedy that one might expect, but it also never commits to the despair that seems to be lingering right under the surface. Despite a truly unhinged final twist that almost makes the entire film worth it, “Paint” is more amusing than laugh-out-loud funny.

You Can Call Me Bill isn’t a travesty; hearing Shatner discuss his life is always fascinating. But instead, the film’s a missed opportunity to unpack one of the more enigmatic figures in our public consciousness.

It’s never anything less than an insightful watch, which doesn’t exactly make it memorable.

While it has interesting things to say about cycles of abuse and the overlap between the church and abusive parents, those ideas are lost in a haze of non-linear storytelling. Even with such problems, this is compelling in individual scenes; if only they added up to anything.

She is Love feels incomplete; it’s a series of scenes searching for a narrative and a trio of talented actors searching for believable characters.

Marlowe isn’t the catastrophe that others may make it out to be, but it’s instead just inert, forgettable immediately after the credits roll. Jordan feels like he’s going through the motions, uninterested in bringing any personality to the genre.

Body Parts has too many ideas running through it to cohere around an effective thesis statement, framing the entire narrative as one of linear progress toward inclusion. It unravels in too many different directions, cramming in first-person testimony, historical overview, and social context into a too-short runtime.

Somewhere within these two hours is a lean-90-minute action film that is only interested in violence and gore. Project Wolf Hunting may occasionally get bogged down in its own mythology-building, but once the kills start piling up, it’s easy to get lost in the mayhem.

While compelling in individual scenes, especially as the boys navigate their increased anger at the world, Beautiful Beings ultimately whiplashes between too many ideas and subplots to create a coherent thematic through line.

Taurus may not reach the existential heights of “Last Days,” but it’s a step in the right direction for Sutton and a continued reminder that Baker needs more roles that reflect his skill set.

This Land often feels like a simplified (but not unwelcome) plea for sentimentality— its observational approach essentially diffuses any political reading. It’s odd to watch a film so invested in the rhythms of politics that is also strangely apolitical.

If First Love never really coheres into a fully formed film, it nevertheless finds Edwards moving more towards narrative expansion than ever before. We are a long way from the imitative style he showcased in his first feature.

While the first hour or so is compelling, the problem with The Policeman’s Lineage isn’t so much the fact that it’s an amalgamation of various genres and tropes, but more that there is little coherency when the film transitions between them, creating a feeling of whiplash.

While Trocker attempts to connect the form to the content of the film, he gets lost in his formalist conceits, never creating fully realized characters to hold the weight of his structural choices.

When the film drifts into the larger discourse of Abercrombie’s fall, it favors simplistic answers — namely the democratization of social media — over a more critical interrogation of why Abercrombie fell, and how they are still trying to claw their way back to relevancy.

Unfortunately, as its title implies, Meat the Future is more glorified advertisement than deep-dive into the clean-meat movement.

Return to Space is a bit too neatly packaged and overly idealistic about what SpaceX might mean for space travel. By turning their focus up to the stars, the filmmakers, unfortunately, ignore the myriad issues that private space travel creates on earth.

Marionette is a bit less than the sum of its individual parts. Still, for the first half of its runtime, the film is sufficiently compelling.

Menoh works to claim her own narrative against the forces that would seek to define and codify her own artistry. But, in doing so, we never get a sense of who Menoh is as an artist. Who is Lunn*na Menoh? An artist, provocateur, and, also, a film too in love with its own schematic design.

Hodge treats him as an entertaining anomaly, diagnosable in his cruel behavior, and someone you cannot look away from.

The Longs’ debut film may be Frankensteined together from disparate genres. Still, it also is an occasionally delightful, sometimes funny, but also just often dull comedy that, ultimately, wastes a game cast on underdeveloped material.

While riffing off almost every film about androids that came before it — “A.I.,” “Ex Machina,” etc. — Baird’s film fails to add anything new to the sub-genre, creating a derivative pastiche of better works that often looks visually compelling but collapses under an underwritten script.

Mosquito State may fall short in synthesizing its odd fusion of body-horror and cautionary Wall Street tale, but it’s nevertheless a memorably gross film that shows Rymsza should make work more often.

America: The Motion Picture only works in fits and starts, more a series of discrete parodies than coherent film. While some of these moments are amusing, and occasionally laugh out loud funny, most are only mildly entertaining.

The Ice Road is a serviceable, if incredibly convoluted, addition to a recent run of bland action movies that ask the actor to do the bare minimum— scowling as things explode around him.

The Russos are obviously ambitious in their treatment, cramming what amounts to half-a-dozen features into this nearly 2.5-hour film. Overt stylization does not stifle a compassionate performance by Holland and breakthrough from Bravo, but Cherry is seemingly at war with itself, never able to synthesize form and content in a meaningful way.

In the end, Hillbilly Elegy is shameless Oscar bait only redeemed by Close and Bennett’s restrained work.

The Secrets We Keep is a film in search of a more coherent message.

There’s little egregiously terrible about The Lost Husband, but a lot of the film is less than memorable. The relaxed, casual vibe is often at odds with the amount of sorrow that has seemingly crippled these characters. Yet, it’s the type of film that you already know the ending before the first scene is over.

Alice and the Mayor isn’t bad, per se; it’s just routine. Not radical enough to be the political call to action that it so desperately wants to be, and not fully developed enough to the character study that it eventually reverts back to, it’s a strange hybrid of a film, with the two disparate sections never really working in conjunction.