Daniel Schindel

The movie shifts gears with each section.... This hodgepodge encourages some variety in the world-building, but, to the littlest detail, it’s derivative — and, worse, not scary.

The most frustrating aspect of The Lovers and the Despot is its refusal to do more than simply recite its tale, ignoring the interesting concepts lurking within it.

[Stillman's] dry sense and cutting sensibility are suited to the meaner edge this story has in comparison with the rest of Austen’s oeuvre.

Little Men could have been so much more if its perspective leaned towards the opposite direction.

As an exploration of identity as it is felt, projected, and interpreted, this is masterful.

Taking a straightforward approach isn’t necessarily a negative, but the sedate camerawork and editing make the movie’s progression staid. Even the musical moments are invigorating due to the music itself, and not by how it’s presented.

American Animals is a legitimately exciting, funny, suspenseful, and at one point deeply upsetting crime film, ably demonstrating a command of genre trappings in service of a narrative about people warped by those very clichés.

As a thinkpiece generator, it is absolutely spectacular – by every other metric, it’s a failure.

This doc may actually benefit more from a viewing outside any contemporary hype vortex.

Director Tim Wardle lays a lot on the strength of the events he’s covering, and they are indeed compelling enough on their own to hold your interest. The flipside of this is that the film has little power outside of a first viewing.

Shirkers finds the emotional grounding and even universality in a very strange story.

There is undeniable craft here, and an impossible-to-ignore signal that everyone involved in the project deserves attention going forward. What does work is strong, sometimes powerful.

This may be Iannucci’s weakest-written film, but it’s by far his best-directed one.

It is vital to bring stories like this to wider attention, but it cannot be said for certain whether the movie does so at the cost of furthering Marish’s suffering and thus also exploiting her.

Leave No Trace’s acute sense of place and how people relate to it makes for great, emotion-laden naturalism.