Christian Gallichio

Red Moon Tide is obviously the work of a director willing to push the boundaries of visual narrative, but he doesn’t see that work fully through.

While Trauki’s film may not go down in the pantheon of killer creature features, like the similarly themed “47 Meters Down: Uncaged,” it’s a lean and effective B movie.

The Reason I Jump is a rewarding watch that attempts to give insight into the interior lives of those living with autism.

The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet is a visually realized film with perhaps too much on its mind for its limited runtime.

The Best is Yet to Come may take a while to get to its point, but it is nevertheless made with a sincere conviction about the ways in which journalism can give voice to the humanity underneath these restrictive laws.

Even with the notable gaps in Dalla’s story and slight storytelling, For Lucio works as a professional, if not precisely personal, introduction to the renowned musician, showcasing how his songs reflected a country that was grappling with class struggles and an identity crisis during the 1970s.

By presenting all sides, Kopple’s film provides objectivity at the expense of immersion, crafting an all-sides look at a well-known period in American foreign policy.

While the ending––a weird collage that attempts to recontextualize the story that came before it––will probably be the main talking point, it’s also the least-interesting component of Erkman’s feature. Instead, it’s the bifurcated structure that lends itself to a compelling, albeit frustrating narrative.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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