David Robb

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.