Christian Gallichio

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.

We never get a full sense of what these people went through after finding out that Cline was their biological father, mainly because Jourdan doesn’t seem particularly interested in unpacking these issues, or giving enough narrative space to explore the psychological toll.

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.

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.

Despite featuring an intriguing set-up and good cast, The Night Clerk offers nothing new to the genre, predictably hitting the same beats, without variation.

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.

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.

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.

The biographical and fictional afterlives of Monroe are particularly interesting, and probably tell us more about the authors who choose to dedicate their lives to researching her than anything new about Monroe, herself. One wishes that Cooper, and Summers, would’ve realized this.

Flight Risk is never as campy as it should be.

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.