Hunter Lanier

Had these themes of accepting the consequences of actions, living up to one’s word, the moral weakness of youth been better capitalized on, or had a little fun been had, The Green Knight would have done a better job at earning itself a place in the storybooks.

None of the set pieces are inventive, and the dialogue is either overly serious or hacky ha-has. In addition to the bland everyman at the center of the story, all the supporting characters are soulless mouthpieces.

Gaia uses its atmosphere to great effect.

The mundane is only as mundane as you make it, and the supernatural can be painfully mundane.

Drunk Bus, directed by Brandon Laganke and John Carlucci, is a deja-vu inducing coming-of-age story with enough character and good cheer to make you forgive how unadventurous it is.

Instead of stitching together interviews and footage into a chronological plot, Wharton goes with the proverbial flow.

There’s much to like about Hope, but it’s the honesty I liked best.

Giving a boxing movie a philosophical back-alley brain transplant is just maniacal enough to work, especially when you consider the psychological discipline and physicality required to perform at a high level in any sport. In this way, In Full Bloom functions as a visually exciting tone poem and as a soulful reflection on battle.

While it could have easily been a dark comedy, and almost is, instead, it’s perfectly sincere.

Monster Hunter is red meat to any cynical moviegoer of the modern age looking for exhibit A. It’s been commodified and globalized to the point of nonidentity.

It’s an old-fashioned escapade with a helplessly likable hero—a criminal who can’t help but be better at the former than the latter, despite his best efforts.

It’s jolly, childlike in a good way, and unusual where it counts. It’s a pop-up book that should be prominently displayed and never read.

The intentions of DTF are a little bit of everywhere. It’s sort of about the hollow experience of dating apps, sort of about the lonely life of airline pilots, and sort of about addiction. However, I think its most flattering angle is that it’s about someone slowly realizing his friend is sick—in every meaning of that word—and potentially unsavable.

If you’re hoping Fatman is an explosive, hog wild bullet storm of Christmas camp, dial back your expectations. There’s always next year. If you’re good, that is.

None of the characters feel real, necessarily, but they’re all immensely watchable in their own right.

i’m thinking of ending things is a lawless movie, made up of one memorable scene after another, none of which are restrained by any storytelling edicts—anything goes, and it goes.

You don’t see people like this or interactions like this in the movies unless they’re hopelessly overdone, to the point of drying out all the truth. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is a special movie for this reason and too many others that shouldn’t be read about but seen with your own eyes.

As you follow Ned into adulthood and bear witness to his many exploits—bare-knuckle brawling, throwing together a gang of brutes who wear pretty dresses, walking into a gunfight with a homemade suit of bulletproof armor, and more—you figure out quickly that the movie’s biggest strength is its desire to disgust and disorient.

It has a television movie quality to it as if it’s a dramatization of a newspaper article, rather than something cinematic.

Caught between worlds, Disturbing the Peace isn’t as fun as it begs to be or as eloquent as it’s trying to be.

If being dull is the cardinal sin of the movies, as Capra supposedly said, then Sorrentino is a saint. There’s not a dull moment in Loro, whether it’s the hypersexual, reality-bending party scenes or the quiet backroom conversations where the truth comes at the characters so unexpectedly, they don’t have time to prepare their usual defenses. All of it is visceral pleasure at an eye-bleeding volume.

Lying and Stealing comes across as the object a thief would replace an art piece to prevent anyone from realizing it’s missing at first glance.

Putting it in the kindest possible terms, the movie could be passed off as an exercise in style. Because of this, it does manage to be watchable.

The Lighthouse becomes something that few movies can claim to be: memorable. Detractors might shrug it off as self-indulgent, artsy slop, but it’s too damn fun and aesthetics-minded for that accusation to hold much weight.

Aaron Paul brings his trademark street-corner angst to the party, and it plays just fine. As child actors go, Murphy is pretty good. McNairy and Winstead do a fine job of realizing that silent, domestic agony that neither party wants to bring out into the open, fearing it won’t go back in.

Toying with the audience’s own expectations and predispositions, Schimberg has made a movie that can be confidently called original.

For the most part, Gwen achieves what it sets out to do. It surrounds you in scenic hopelessness and lets you stew in it until you’re done, or Gwen’s done. By the end of this movie, somebody’s definitely done.

Taking on the melancholy, rain-tapping-a-window tone of Leonard’s music, Broomfield doesn’t try to draw a line through the story artificially but embraces the natural disorder of real life.