Jacob Oller

The writers are so afraid that we won’t feel the right thing that they embrace a self-effacing humor that ensures we don’t feel anything.

Though crafted with wry care and a captivatingly scuzzy aesthetic, the bittersweet biography is so miserable that the “sweet” ends up as a cloying chaser to old escargot.

Learning about Gibson’s ‘roid rage from their treatment, and Falley’s acceptance of it, is a more moving example of their care for one another than much of what the film finds in their shared profession.

The resulting film from Eddie Alcazar is shallow and silly pseudo-experimental sci-fi, made by those assured that they were making something edgy and interesting. To err is human, to film it is Divinity.

As the film moves further and further from its inciting secret, watching Inez and her son age, it fades beneath their countless tone-shifting hardships—revealing a film stronger when its close-shot realism is echoed in the script.

Plenty of the film feels vital—its observations of a nation’s shifting attitude towards war, towards hate, is crushing and familiar.

Those looking for bleak, slow horror and who are willing to suspend plenty of disbelief might want to check it out, but it won’t rock the worlds of the rest of us.

As soon as you unearth a place’s past, it lives on in you—changes you. This is the heart of folk horror that Enys Men speaks to, but its dull, repetitive, padded delivery of images makes its genre findings (in words British enough to befit the film) weak tea.

Stewart applies an admirably experimental vision to her adaptation, but she can’t translate whatever power she may have found in Yuknavitch’s text to the screen.

Many of the cuts and interplay between subjects seem like filler rather than commentary; the lightshows of LEDs and flashlights dancing off the dank walls of sewers reveal no more than a flashy visual sensibility.

Writer/director Rich Peppiatt’s film has a harder time connecting its stylish music video silliness with drama that meanders and a political message that repeats like it’s stuck on a cheap turntable.

Though director Reinaldo Marcus Green finds winning performances away from his lead, the milquetoast script serves the tennis patriarch a soft lob—one without potential to inspire or excite, and one that’s constantly reminding us that we already know how it ends.

Despite its important subject and impressive access, the surprisingly surface-level film doesn’t have much to say.

While Plaza continues to make her case as a versatile A-lister capable of leading the more complex version of this kind of heist film, Emily the Criminal is a little like an initiation that never needed to happen. Her bonafides are proven. But it still stands as another showcase for her, as she shines even through its uninspired racket.

A fresh take on how our hyper-connected world observes catastrophe would rightly pick at this scab. But Alex Garland approaches this modern hopelessness with impersonal detachment, dreaming up an empty war filmed for no one.

Phillips simply tries to do too much.

Filmmaker Amber Fares assembles a ton of footage into a thorough portrait of a disillusioned activist-comedian, though that portrait and the one-woman show it revolves around are themselves limited messengers of a worthwhile call to action.

By only brushing up against the factors that make its case fascinatingly, timelessly American, The Burial stays soft, a trial by pillow-fight—but that’s how you please a crowd.

Though its bold genre gamble and strong lead turn from Maisy Stella keep My Old Ass from the YA slush pile, its feint towards being a more cerebral movie about hope and regret, two opposing forces separated only by time, infects the mediocrity of its more traditional story with disappointment.

Bros says many of the right things, often loudly and directly, as it reblazes an already well-marked trail towards normative convention.

For those who haven’t really thought about the filmmaking behind the glut of true-crime clogging up the streamer carousels, there are some revelatory moments of media criticism in here. But for those more aware of how the sausage is made, it’s simply a light and dry bit of jabbing at a dominant kind of media.

A Compassionate Spy is not a thrilling recollection of treason. It has little to say about the actual espionage that Hall pulled off when he was an 18-year-old Harvard grad working on the Manhattan Project.

Despite a few moments of heightened bliss that remind us what kind of talent it has in front of the camera (and the operatic possibilities of Hong Kong action), Raging Fire’s dull discussion of policing never lights a fire.

The main attractions for Marvel’s Ten Ring circus are better when freed from the MCU’s captivity.

The film builds to its conclusion without building its main character.

There is power in the inescapable, in the dreaded endpoint of becoming news after a lifetime spent fearing it—mourning it. But despite its length and artistic competence, Brother’s lack of affecting specificity displays rather than embodys grief.

Its dedication to Long’s point-of-view is admirable, but Lee’s filmmaking hits the brakes like a student driver, sacrificing what made the framing narrative enticing in the first place.

Bleak and crisp and cold as an Icelandic waterfall, Lamb is a movie with a sheepheaded toddler in great knitwear, the vague looming of something sinister and a filmmaker that can’t seem to wrangle it all.