Christian Gallichio

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.

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.

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.

Water’s film is merely bland, a boring hodgepodge of Gen-Z references and a workmanlike script that never seems to understand what it’s trying to say.

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

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.

If the film splits its time a bit too loosely and unevenly between ICP biography, anthropological study of Juggalo culture, and trial recitation, all three of these subplots are nothing less than fascinating.

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 not exactly revolutionary in its construction, Hepner and Mossman have nevertheless crafted a grounded and realistic look into how biotech companies, and human trials, operate.