Derek Smith

The film remains too uncompromisingly black and white as a character study and a story of the conflicts of faith.

As the film spirals outward from its central relationship to delve into other characters’ hidden pasts, the story becomes too unwieldy and fragmented for the audience to develop a comprehensive understanding of Callum Turner's Thomas or his personal evolution.

Ultimately, Kidnap is an efficient vehicle for the delivery of some lean action that's frequently weakened by a scarcely whip-smart script.

The film is lazily content to simply put its female characters through the potty-mouthed, gross-out comedy ringer.

The Last Face's shameful exploitation of Africans doesn’t stop with the mere privileging of its two wealthy white doctors and their trivial personal struggles within the narrative.

The film creates a deeply rooted sense of realism that contrasts the austere, surreal illustrations.

Endless Poetry eventually, like young Alejandro, opens itself up to the world in all of its beauty and complexities.

The conspicuous means by which Will Raee stacks the deck against Leanne, the real victim of this story, is matched only by a moral grandstanding that seeks to condemn rather than understand the character’s decisions.

Aside from further vilifying the Nazis, the film's ideological endgame remains a bit too slippery.

It's unsettling and disconcerting in its complex examination of the gray area that lies between the morals we conceptually hold and the actions we’re willing to perform to affirm those beliefs in the world.

Mauro Borrelli's The Recall has the look of a SyFy original movie and the self-seriousness of Ridley Scott's recent Alien films.

Like Lisa and Kate’s pendular swings between hope and despair, Johannes Roberts’s film can’t help alternating between the genuinely terrifying and the just plain dumb.

The Hunter’s Prayer packs its brisk 85 minutes with an impressive array of car chases, gun fights, hand-to-hand combat, and foot pursuits, all cut with a precision and an economy that heightens the impact of every hit.

Its gory conclusion is presented with an ostentatious grandiosity that the rest of the film simply doesn’t justify.

Its incoherent turn of events attempts to stupefy us into mistaking its deeply flawed internal logic for ingenuity.

Writer-director Robin Swicord's film seems content to merely carry out its absurdist premise until the bitter end.

Hounds of Love builds to a crescendo that earns its emotional catharsis while staying true to its roots as a truly chilling and intense thriller.

From its rigorous and deliberately distancing structural gambit to its restless stylistic experimentations, Thirty Two Short Films proves that biopics needn’t color within the lines to effectively portray their subjects.

The film never quite pushes beyond the archetypal nature of its scenario to fully unearth its characters’ psychological turmoil.

Economic anxiety is rarely spoken about in the film, but the life-and-death importance of dollars and cents is felt in every frame.

For all of Buck and the Preacher’s serious attempts to function as a revisionist western by centering Blacks in the narrative and examining the critical role they played on the frontier, it’s also a wildly entertaining film.

It's anchored by a pair of dynamic, intuitive performances which mine the psychological complexities of an understandably troubled relationship.

This beautiful presentation of Vittorio De Sica’s fantastical portrait of poverty and human fortitude helps make the argument that the film is more than just a curio in neorealist history.

The film’s depiction of life impacted by urban transformation conjures a palpable aura of entrapment and helplessness.

Jarmusch playfully blurs the line between driver/passenger, servant/customer, and native/immigrant, presenting these divisions as virtually meaningless social constructs which merely breed unnecessary contempt.

Everything in I Wanna Hold Your Hand is pushed right up to the breaking point of absurdity. The lunacy of pop-culture infatuation is lent the undying fervor of a fever dream.

Though Duke’s film lacks the warmth and humanism of Something Wild, it’s possessed of a similarly idiosyncratic edginess.

The Train makes unmistakably clear to us that heroism isn’t always black and white—that sometimes it’s simply about doing what’s right even if you don’t understand why.