Jacob Oller

Mumenthaler accesses both sides of Lina’s uncanny dissociation, the lonesome and the sublime. It’s a captivating assessment of a hypersensitive mental state, nonjudgmental yet clear-eyed about the power it holds over its subject. But what allows The Currents to sweep you away is its understanding of impermanence.

This is lizard-brain ass-kicking, done about as well as you could hope, with a variety of martial art styles, ridiculous weaponry, and oddball characters for flavor.

It’s a slow drip towards the end, reality running out like blood from a vein, leaving only a body of stories behind. But without a compelling narrative or affecting emotions at its core, the subversion is often as shallow as the legend.

Savage House is caught, then, in a conundrum like that posing its characters: It’s too respectable to entirely ignore, yet too obvious and coarse to entertain those whose attention it courts.

Dosa’s film—which she wrote alongside Magnason, Jocelyne Chaput, and Erin Casper—sometimes strains a bit too visibly to connect this theme, becoming so enraptured with the encapsulating power of ice that the film protests too much about its own profundity.

It’s suburban strip mall horror, which Parsons demystifies over the course of his overwrought directorial debut.

The ensuing shenanigans parade a cast of slumming heavy-hitters (Fiona Shaw, Charles Dance) going through the motions of ancient “battle of the sexes” jokes.

When in doubt, screenwriters Zachary Donohue and T.W. Burgess so awkwardly rush back to genre conventions that it feels like Passenger failing a series of trust falls before our eyes.

I Love Boosters paints another winning amusement park ride in the bright colors of its filmmaker’s politics.

It’s because Mortal Kombat II is neither campy enough to revel in its violent bad taste, nor earnest enough to pull off its sprawling ambitions that it most resembles a late-stage Marvel entry.

Even if it wasn’t hot on the tail of Pixar’s Hoppers, Swapped would still be an overly familiar adventure towards empathy, one light on comedy and insight despite plenty of visual imagination in its world of flora-fauna hybrids.

Farrelly’s film wanders aimlessly without being driven by anything absurd or outrageous enough to conjure a Hangover-like reaction, nor anything with enough humanity to justify the occasional heart-to-heart conversations between Brad and Elijah.

By the time Zimmer helps connect past and present, memory and reality, the ensemble’s lived-in performances already gesture towards the logical outcome. We just hope it isn’t true.

Exit 8 excels at capturing that isolation and disaffection in an elegant environmental ouroboros, though what it does once it establishes its atmosphere never matches that simple artistry.

It’s a straightforward slasher with a tech-savvy twist, ironically not outlandish enough to stand out from the formerly forbidden footage filling our feeds every single day.

Over Your Dead Body is a gleeful, bloody romp masquerading as a dark marriage comedy, though unsurprisingly the two sides of its genre dynamic have a dysfunctional relationship.

If you’re not immediately tickled by Normal‘s premise, which cements into the traditions of narrative conflict—man versus nature, man versus man, man versus self—the very literal concept of “man versus entire town,” this is the least of the Odenkickass movies. And if that idea makes you smile, Normal might be even more disappointing for how mechanically it goes through motions that used to be novel.

Over two-and-a-half hours, the duo’s film gazes in wonder at alien engineering, opens its heart to human vulnerability through karaoke, and makes the case that inspiring the next generation (or at least perpetuating its existence) is alluring enough to shake the smarmiest manchildren from their self-imposed exile. Most effectively, though, Project Hail Mary sees a personal sense of humor shine through the bludgeoning grandeur of a AAA sci-fi.

It’s both more and less than “Taken: Mom Edition,” another boneheaded poking of conservative’s self-inflicted wounds around human trafficking with a title just as deluded as its content.

The abusive push-pull between America and Mexico, the conflict between the exotic fantasy of a Latin lover and its xenophobic underbelly, crashes into two people too ill-defined to function as anything more than symbols.

At the center of it all is Powell, making the same face for an hour and 45 minutes, too unflappable to root for, too smug to magnetize as an inhuman American Psycho. And How To Make A Killing needed to pick a side, either of clownish class comedy or of bitter sociopathic satire.

As the memory fades into history, My Father’s Shadow blurs into documentary footage, which then blurs with wishful thinking. It’s formally ambitious for such a contained film, but grants this small-scale story the well-considered gravity of something held close to the heart.

The pulp and action are sold by Statham with the resigned competence of a factory worker clocking in for a shift, and Breathnach’s over-eager performance is balanced out by her expressive face. They’re a decent team to watch go through the motions, running through underworld contacts and old pals who owe one last favor.

The Wrecking Crew casts about between genres like driftwood caught by the tide; for two hours, the script cycles between family trauma drama, goofy Hawaiian noir, meathead romp, and wham-bang slugfest. The indecision at least showcases some consistency, though, in that each approach is equally dissatisfying.

Somewhere between a reboot and a remake, Return To Silent Hill is the worst film of the franchise so far, and a reminder that you can’t go home again—even if your home is the haunted hamlet of Silent Hill.

It’s 81 damning minutes of tight filmmaking, great storytelling, and riveting investigation.

Aside from these shallow moments of over-explanation and a kinetic ending that lifts whole cloth from the aforementioned Beau Travail, this exciting debut boasts some honest and cutting commentary around these angry, confused little boys.

Divided yet compounding as the totality of Resurrection unfolds, our sharpened senses catch onto the details of Bi’s work, our awareness heightened around how many ways we can engage with the film in front of us, and movies in general.