David Robb

This is subject matter that might sound heavy, but the difficult feelings dredged up never overwhelm the film’s gentle, character-driven approach.

Only cheap shock value can be gleaned from the film’s cavalcade of blood, semen, animal carcasses, dick pics, and erotic toothbrushing.

Yellow Letters ultimately proves to be much less than the sum of its parts, as a lack of focus prevents its political commentary and humanist drama from cohering in any meaningful way.

The film’s brisk pace does partly compensate for the essential banality of the central investigation.

Tessa Thompson's presence is captivating, as she relishes in exploring her character's gleeful and occasionally anxious villainy.

Though Hamnet is concerned with bottomless grief and the unique power of art to express the inexpressible, it can’t help but telegraph its themes loudly and incessantly, its emotional register off-puttingly monotonous.

The film’s mythologizing is refreshingly measured, and it offers an appealingly earnest take on the American story.

The possibility of relating to the characters is constantly hindered by the struggle to make sense of the story’s messily sketched dystopia.

There’s a low-key warmth to Romvari’s painstaking portrait of quotidian family life, as her documentarian attention to detail creates an intoxicatingly vivid rendering of 1990s suburbia.

As Dracula wears on, its lack of focus starts to grate, while Radu Jude’s deployment of profane, disreputable dialogue and imagery starts to resemble a stylistic tic more than a genuine affront to his audience’s sensibilities.

The film’s multi-layered structure supports a familiar but often profoundly affecting tale of intergenerational family conflict.

It’s possible that a kind of objective moral ambiguity was the goal here, but given the sensitive nature of the material, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that the film’s vagueness is the calculated strategy of those unwilling to take a side.

Uncertainty extends to the film’s mood, which fluctuates between dreamy ennui and slowly escalating dread.

Ultimately, Henry Johnson’s cynical assertions about society and human nature are the only aspects that end up resonating, for better or worse.

Its bizarre mismatch of form and content mostly saps it of life, tamping down the tension and frequently suggesting an accidentally distributed proof of concept for a project that never managed to secure funding.

As evocative as it is, the film’s use of small-town squalor as a blank canvas for artful indulgences often detracts from its purported authenticity.

Blitz is an earnest, broad-strokes portrait of a bustling city that occasionally succeeds in communicating the unprecedented sensory shock of modern warfare, but its uncritical craftsmanship and quarantining of past atrocities from present-day concerns also render the proceedings mostly lifeless.

Often blunt and unwieldy, Mohamed Rasolouf's film is nevertheless impactful.

Though juxtaposing Canada’s drabness and relative lack of heritage with Iran’s millennia of unbroken tradition brings out the former aspects particularly clearly, Universal Language is aiming beyond mere satire or culture-clash playfulness.

Plunging headlong into the murk of exploitative missionary work and environmentally destructive capitalism, Transamazonia is a film with undeniable import and sociopolitical urgency, which its muddled narrative can’t completely dampen.

The film seems to insist upon the idea that intimacy and isolation are ultimately two sides of the same coin.

With none of the satisfying aesthetic appeal or narrative potency of the original, Dawn of the Nugget is happy to plod along as a functional joke vehicle fueled mostly by fond memories of its acclaimed predecessor.

The sheer exuberance of the story and the stylistic brio of Jeff Nichols’s direction often compensate for the film’s lack of authenticity.

As the film wears on, Diana’s personal motivations are increasingly blurred, and to the point that she comes to be defined almost exclusively by the adversity over which she triumphs.

David Fincher dabbles in the pleasures of genre without ever allowing the outlandish scenario to be treated with more respect than it deserves.

Priscilla’s delicate mystique struggles to free itself from an oppressive mood board imposed from without by six decades of history.

While its globe-trotting sense of wonder shows the joys of offline existence to be as profound and vivid as they ever were, its simultaneous sense of boundless possibility and stagnant futility recalls nothing so much as the chaotic, alienating realm of cyberspace that both birthed and shaped it.

Some pleasingly odd visuals and a sustained off-kilter mood will likely please many animation fans who haven’t had any exposure to the source material, but Pierre Foldes’s film ultimately fails to create any clear identity of its own.

Even at its most confrontational, the film maintains a carefully controlled deadpan tone.

Unwilling to risk subjectivity or authorial input, and also lacking in the forensic detail that might have provided a more in-depth analysis of the Centre de jour l’Adamant and its functioning, On the Adamant ultimately feels half-formed.

Rye Lane’s antic energy and caricatured portrait of England’s capital city fail to make its central romance truly resonate.

George Clooney’s and Julia Roberts’s undimmed charisma brings enough grace notes to Ticket to Paradise that you could easily be taken in by its low-stakes frivolity.

Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s film is unwilling to really sit with the peculiarity of its protagonists’ unique psyches.

The film half-heartedly teeters between a kinetic action thriller and something a little more low-key.

Emma Seligman’s film effectively builds tension from what is a relatively familiar, low-key scenario.

The film lacks for the empathy, curiosity, and sense of humor that are the defining characteristics of the Smiths’s music.

Had the film trusted its self-imposed minimalism a little more, it might have been a lot more successful as a character study.

The film portrays mental illness with all the nuance and insight of Jared Leto in Suicide Squad.

Best exemplified by its fixation on culottes, the film never feels like more than a half-formed in-joke between close friends.

Francis Lee’s compulsion to make Mary Anning stand in for something broader than herself keeps tripping up the film.

The low-key, serene natural beauty of Beginning’s setting provides a counterpoint to the often-disturbing events of the film.

The precarity and itinerant lifestyle of the central figures in Kajillionaire can be seen as a logical next step in Miranda July’s filmmaking trajectory.

The series’s ambient preoccupation with death is foregrounded more than ever before with this film’s main dramatic subplot.

The film’s insistence on keeping the stakes low throughout is probably its key strength.

The film’s use of scale to drive home the absurdity of its characters’ actions sometimes calls to mind Werner Herzog’s tragicomic existentialism, as well as early silent cinema.

Onur Tukel’s film doesn’t live up to the promise of this fleet-footed opening.

The film evinces neither the visceral pleasures of noir nor the precision to uncover deeper thematic resonances.