Ed Gonzalez

As its second half begins to focus more on Lucy’s dating dilemma, and how she’s forced to confront her firmly established beliefs and rules about dating, the film hews increasingly close to the narrative expectations of the traditional rom-com.

Had we been allowed to truly sit with the characters’ prejudices, then The Damned might have earned the desperation with which it strains for contemporary resonance.

Amy Nicholson’s empathy for her subjects is undeniable.

Shove everything into the meat grinder of cynicism and, in the end, your insights come to feel purely incidental.

The film doesn’t lock on a target long enough for it to work up a head of steam as satire about the art world and how it thrives on nepotism, let alone one about the frustrations of the immigration process.

Roman Liubyi’s documentary is nothing if not self-consciously obsessed with its own making.

When Dominion isn’t suffocating itself with world-building, much of it frustratingly untapped, it’s wholly given over to corny fan service.

R.M.N. is more suspense thriller than procedural, and it’s content to have the audience walk on the razor’s edge of doubt and fear through much of its two-hour running time. Perhaps too content.

A New Era’s acknowledgement that some things must die for new things to be born works to justify the film’s title by quietly linking its themes of entitlement and survival.

There are clichés and then there are only clichés, and Firebird is suffocated by them.

The film is a muddle of clichés and unremarkable action sequences that bleed together into a cacophony.

No Man’s Land mostly suggests a performance of allyship on the filmmakers’ part.

The plot, geared as much for comedy as horror, is wound with efficient build-up, and its revolving-door atmosphere is consistent enough to paper over some iffy acting, baggy dialogue, and more than a few minutes of wasted real estate.

Carné’s France, unlike the fiddle-dee-dee of Victor Fleming’s cotton pickin’ South, is a poetic realist’s wonderland, a gateway to a dreamworld where human laws are mere judicial errors and love is so painful to hold onto it can only be savored in the moment.

Through to the end, you can’t get off on the thrill of this film’s craftsmanship without also getting off on the spectacle of more than just Cecilia brought to the brink of destruction. Like its style, The Invisible Man’s cruelty is the point.

For Patricio Guzmán, to gaze at the Cordillera is to comprehend the range of history and the possibility of its distortion.

By the end, it’s as if a good doctor’s god complex has been taken up by the film itself.

Every scene here feels as if it begins with a grenade being thrown into a room, leaving one to wonder how it will be diffused, and after a while, all you see are the gears of various sublots turning separately until they mesh together and move in unison.

It never resolves its commingling of the fanciful and the mundane into a particularly coherent argument about the legacy of trauma.

Castro’s feature-length directorial debut is a profound and casually artful expression of the lengths to which people go in order to not have to embody their desires.

A shrill and insipid spectacle of cross-cultural communion, but don’t call it stupid, as that would suggest that it doesn’t know exactly what it’s doing.

The way the film shuttles through its 90 minutes, it’s as if it’s been stripped of its most crucial narrative parts.

Throughout, the film peddles notions of self-realization and self-actualization that feel nothing short of moth-eaten.

The film is a haunting portrait of the island as a purgatorial realm between the poles of isolation and liberation.

There’s something undeniably ballsy about a children’s film that’s so insistent about pushing young viewers to think bigger, to be open to new ideas and question culturally coded notions of good and evil.

Gaspar Noé's camera captures every freak-out, recrimination, stolen kiss, and betrayal in what is a miracle of synchronicity.

For a spell, Boots Riley's cultural ire is so cool-headed that Sorry to Bother You easily distinguishes itself from Mike Judge's similarly themed Idiocracy, but along the way it, too, settles for swinging for the fences—so much so that the target of its satire is no longer in its crosshairs.

Hotel Artemis quickly reveals its future setting as an empty pretext for a banally convoluted and sentimentalized show of emotional rehabilitation.