Greg Cwik

The whole endeavor feels like a disservice to Mark Hogancamp’s story, in no small part because no one in the film feels human, even outside doll form.

Fede Álvarez’s film suffers from a compulsion to be capital-C cool, and all of its ostensibly stylish shots are untethered to any semblance of a sustained reality.

Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria is a funereal pseudo-realist drama about political upheaval and the violence of systems that's at odds with itself.

In their best films, the Coens mine the depths of loneliness and egotism and frailty and solipsism. But in THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS there's a noticeable lack of deeper insinuation, a lack of curiosity.

A story of filth and fury and, eventually, of placidity and peace, Her Smell is Alex Ross Perry’s most chaotic and unmuffled film — until it isn’t.

This is both a fitting tribute to an artist who rebuffed conventional painting techniques, and a disappointingly self-indulgent exercise, the efforts of a filmmaker whose affinity for abstractions often interfere with the story he’s trying to tell, and distract from the purported subject of the film.

Wildlife is at once loquacious and laconic, a film in which simple words hold unspoken and unequivocal power, and the space between banal utterances become chasms.

After more than 20 features, Paul Schrader has been reborn with First Reformed, an unhurried, furious, deeply agonized look at faith and skepticism that’s as reverent as it is blasphemous.

The setup of a 24-hour relationship that bypasses the getting-to-know-you phase speaks to the nature of expedited modern dating culture, but despite its attempts at intimacy, Duck Butter is difficult to fall in love with.

An incessant deluge of subplots drowns what could have been a sparse and beautiful ghost story.

Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here could be considered artsy exploitation, a film whose formal dexterity belies its debts to its chosen, and quite squalid, genre.

Though Double Lover has a slight oneiric quality from the start, it grows increasingly delirious, the plot threads knotting in convoluted patterns and the overall mood more and more ridiculous.

Every pan and snap zoom and dissolve is exact, every whorl of smoke and wind-thrown swath of leaves pulled from a dream and placed methodically before our eyes.

The film is about the idea of Andy Kaufman, about how artists channel their influences and keep the dead alive.

The fractured rhythm of 1945 and the desolate aesthetic are engrossing, but Ferenc Török's film doesn't linger.

It's an exercise in joviality, unflinching in its love for Joan Didion, and unwilling to be much more.

The characters' emotional vacancy feels like another auteurist tic to which Yorgos Lanthimos is dauntlessly committed.

The tone throughout vacillates wildly from silly comedy to classic Hollywood melodrama, and all of it feels as artificial and unsatisfying as the cotton candy twirling in a vending cart.

Sylvio's banal depictions of everyday loneliness through the diurnal tedium of an anthropomorphic animal brings to mind BoJack Horseman, but without the caustic navel-gazing and self-destruction or the mordant pop-culture musings.

Brawl in Cell Block 99 rarely drags, even when delivering exposition, and the economy of the storytelling is as efficiently brutal as the eventual skull-crackings.

On its own, this is a fun, broadly satirical alien-invasion film, more self-aware than self-serious, but its beauty, its poignancy, comes from its relationship to Kiyoshi Kurosawa's other work.