Fran Hoepfner

Though it ticks all the boxes, there is a lack of surprise and originality.

While it’s great to hear Blume read her own work, such a significant portion of the documentary is focused on excerpting that it might have been more time-saving to assign the books to the audience ahead of time.

The sandbox of “The Seven Faces of Jane” might have been fun for these filmmakers to play in for a while, but the results are drab and uninteresting. If there’s a winner in this particular exquisite corpse game, it’s certainly not the audience.

For the Christmas romcom devotee, it will provide a breath of fresh air in its competency of craft, though for those looking to dip a toe into the genre, Something From Tiffany’s is almost too grounded and complacent in its lack of drama.

The documentary is so outwardly focused, so intended for Western audiences, that it barely transcends the nature of a Wikipedia page, afraid to push back or to show anything that might complicate the notion of what a female leader has to do either to get work done or to be respected (or ideally both).

It would be one thing if the film was fully committed to its nastiness — a type of comedy we don’t see much of these days at all — but “The Estate” is too often hampered by its own self-awareness.

Without a commitment to its tone, How To Please A Woman might help its titular woman, but it leaves its audience quite dissatisfied.

Malmberg’s documentary is quick to gloss over rough patches in both Mickey and Disney’s shared histories.

For all its provocations, After Blue (Dirty Paradise) is rote and tedious. The body horror and gross-outs get repetitive, and none of it ever means much of anything.

Given how much of the new material on Monroe is audio-based, one is left wondering why a project like this wouldn’t work better as a podcast. There is little that’s visually compelling about Cooper’s work, the type of investigation perhaps best listened to in the background of another activity.

Though the first act of The Contractor is its lengthiest, the lazy pace does nothing to enrich the lives of the characters who we know are at stake. The action that follows is quick and cramped; sequences that should feel heart-pounding are, instead, dark and erratic.

The most frightening part of Umma is not the ghostly apparition of Amanda’s mother, but Amanda herself. Under Shim’s direction, Oh’s Amanda is haunted and taut, an unpredictable force of nature.