David Robb

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

In a way, the film feels like a true heir to the petulant, low-budget horror cinema of the ‘70s and ‘80s.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

While Wolfram might struggle to convey a depth of feeling for its characters and the brutal, dehumanizing frontier they call home, it can be an intermittently satisfying good-versus-evil period piece.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.