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.

It often plays like a toothless PR video designed to rehabilitate the Catholic Church's reputation in the wake of its global pedophilia scandal.

In the end, Disobedience is less about the subjugation of the self to the group than the courage to embrace uncertainty if one were to break out of the prison of a world one has been born into.

The film's simple, redundant, but valuable moral lesson to its audience finds comfortable enough expression in an aesthetic that's banal but impressively consistent.

Complicating Sophie Turner's character would have allowed the film to feel as if it had more on its mind than pulling the rug out from under us.

The way that Dominika is at once completely transparent and at the same time impossible to read is Red Sparrow's most intriguing through line, not least of which for the way that Jennifer Lawrence makes you grasp the canny mental gymnastics that her character has to do in order for everything that she says to be at once truth and obfuscation.

Emotional complication is what this film, so abundant in last-minute getaways, fake-outs, and half-hearted nods to the franchise's greatest hits, needed so as to elevate it out of its programmatic torpor.

The film is a doodle, but in its offhanded way, it effectively attests to the resolute nature of the Russian character.

At best competently mounted and at worst a case study in watering down chaos for an American market.

Hany Abu-Assad’s film is notable for the way it fixates on its characters’ rush toward survival, homing in on the intimacy that they achieve without ever suggesting that there’s any actual romance in their future.

Sean Baker spends much of The Florida Project charging in vigorously nimble fashion up and down the stairs of the Magic Castle, in and out of its rooms, investing the minutia of the down-and-out lives within this little ecosystem with a bittersweet energy and significance.

In between raids, in between the meetings with ACT UP members and those who hold the keys to their possible survival, BPM is at its most intimate when observing the exchange of war stories.

The film is only in the business of supplying the sort of fear that hinges entirely on the shock of the exotic.

The film may not reimagine our sense of how the ties that bind bad men are rewritten in times of war, but it nonetheless gives a casually electric sense of how hardscrabble lives persist in such times.

Throughout the film, one wishes for a bit more depth regarding Jessica's professional struggles.

It has the decency to recognize that only Elián González has the right to define his sense of truth for himself.

The film evokes nothing more strongly than a live-action adaptation of a Crate and Barrel catalog.

At its best, the film demonstrates that no art is more political than that which depicts the lived experience of the oppressed with accuracy, empathy, and moral clarity.

The effect of the film becomes not unlike watching a puzzle solve itself without demanding either the audience’s emotional or intellectual investment.

The film cartoonishly admonishing Big Oil while hypocritically fetishizing the gas-guzzling appetite of a cute and cuddly machine-creature hybrid.

It's a misnomer to label the climax of Steven C. Miller's patently sick Arsenal an actual climax.

By the time the film limps toward its Marrakech-set epilogue epilogue, its experiment in social osmosis is as much a failure as its B-sitcom-grade yuks.

The film complements its goose-pimply frights with an unabashedly naked emotional gravitas.

The Lost City of Z links every weathered look that Percy Fawcett throws to the heart of his spiritual yearning.

Tim Burton's direction reminds us of the distinct, peculiar coyness that was always at the heart of his best films.

The haphazard blending of fact and clips from disparate films unrelated to Shin Sang-ok and Choi Eun-hee's ordeal confuses an already intricate tale.

Every incident in the film is a time-bidding maneuver, completely and unimaginatively untethered from logic.

The film's sustainment of its corkscrew tension is so elegant and methodical as to feel dance-like.

One comes to resent the film for how it thrills to the possibility of a father hurting his children.

The film slightly reorients our perspective on the familiar tropes of both the teen and apocalyptic genres.

When divorced of message-mongering, the film’s scare tactics are among the most distinctive that the zombie canon has ever seen.

The doc's caginess is a weakness that results from an inherently nostalgic sense of reverie.

The film's weird reformulation of the Electra complex is nothing short of a sexist fantasy of salvation.

The sheer amount of people and incident indifferently presented throughout this film suggests only an obligation to quota-filling.

The Drake Doremus film all comes down, simplistically and repeatedly, to “feelings make us feel alive.”

The film is committed to the sort of broad strokes that reduce a great artist's life to a spectacle of self-pity.

Every short exudes a commercially slick anonymity that effectively flattens any potential excitement.

Criminal's absence of style, the lack of relish the filmmakers take in the material's inherent ludicrousness, is a failure of conviction.

The film's unbelievably precise choreography of action seeks to tap into a universal feeling of powerlessness.

Like its predecessor, the film is content to dumbly relish in the inanity of Mike's rampage.

The film is the cinematic equivalent of watching a Rubik's Cube noisily solve itself for 90 minutes.

The so-called suicide forest's cultural value is trivialized in the bum-rush to liberate the main characters from their agonies.

The film's meticulousness orchestration only calls attention to its dubious sense of purpose, which lies beyond human subjectivity.

At the center of the film is a conservative lesson that asks us to unquestioningly abide by society's capitalistic impulses.

In so clearly viewing Lili through the lens of 21st-century political correctness, the film only blunts the resolve of her struggle.

The tacky and loose means by which the platitudinous screenplay dances around what ails the story's football players is just one cog in a whirligig of pat representations.

Gaspar Noé's lack of self-investigation merely situates the film as a libidinal advertisement for a tantrum-prone filmmaker's delayed adulthood.

The film quickly settles into a depressingly one-note groove as a culture-clashing circus act.

Cary Joji Fukunaga’s artistry registers less as psychological imprint than as a measure of his professional bona fides.

Microbe and Gasoline is enervating for both relishing whimsy and looking behind it to absorb the yearnings of youth and its attendant complications in all their nakedness.

The savagery here is rooted in retrograde myths that might have been easier to stomach had the cannibalism been positioned as a fantastical unleashing of retribution.

Every set piece brings to mind an Epcot Center attraction built from borrowed parts, geared toward reinforcing the young audience's belief that adults just don't understand them.

The filmmakers, for better and for worse, stay out of the actresses' way, as Freeheld's artistry is so unadorned that the performances somehow feel more naked as a result.

Denis Villeneuve's film views life in the age of the modern-day drug war as an ever-crescendoing existential nightmare.

The film squanders the promise of its scrutiny into how people recalibrate their sense of morality in times of crisis.

It merely exudes an aura of cheap manipulation by which the audience is simply asked to rank the film's characters on a d-bag scale and root for their survival, or destruction, accordingly.

The film's corporate blandness is almost as dispiriting as its disinterest in exploiting the inherent saliency of the material.

The film comes undone in its clumsy attempts to transform its story into a parable of economic distress.

Its triumph is primarily a matter of style, a visionary revelation every bit as expressionistic as its main character's electric sense of shade.

It trivializes victim trauma by treating its main character's best-laid plans as punchline fodder.

Dope is a mess of styles and mixed signals, a pulp fiction that mostly tend to its loyalties to other cine-odysseys through the streets of Los Angeles.

In lieu of advancing a view of the dead's dominion that doesn't abide by the law of "just becauses," Chapter 3 is often content to wink at the ways the first two films spooked audiences.

In Brad Peyton's San Andreas, the biggest earthquake in recorded history is less natural disaster than divorce negotiation process.

A pageantry of pseudo-art poses, a self-consciously cool reorientation of the western as silly symphony.

Its only claim to uniqueness becomes running the standard zombie narrative through a Hallmark-card filter.

The film struggles against the rigid formula that typifies the Marvel universe, but only does so up to a point.

Throughout, Helen Hunt obsequiously tends to her character's evolution as a parent through a flagrant indulgence of sitcom-ish scenarios.

Less a sincerely kooky elegy to lost time than a slightly off-kilter acting out of familiar rom-com bona fides about commitment-phobes missing out on life.

It conveys life experience to such a sentimentalized degree that the world comes to resemble only the sham of a Norman Rockwell painting.

The film is at once devoted to corroborating and casting an exaggerated light on Soviet paranoia and the state's rhetoric of unmasking its enemies.

If all a movie needed was a boy with abs and a gun (or slingshot), then Beyond the Reach would be a masterpiece.