Jacob Oller

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Paste Magazine, The A.V. Club, The Film Stage
For 358 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 35% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 62% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 2.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Jacob Oller's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 63
Highest review score: 91 In the Heights
Lowest review score: 0 Five Nights at Freddy's 2
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 204 out of 358
  2. Mixed: 113 out of 358
  3. Negative: 41 out of 358
358 movie reviews
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    • 48 Metascore
    • 69 Jacob Oller
    Abe & Phil's Last Poker Game
    The film’s highlight is the swaggering Sorvino. More charming with age, like wine or scoundrels, he manages to enrapture without pandering, entertain without sacrifice or compromise.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 88 Jacob Oller
    Past Lives
    Besides announcing Song as a brilliant observer of dialogue, interaction, and tone, Past Lives is a strikingly romantic movie about what composes our lives.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 91 Jacob Oller
    Blue Heron
    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.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 75 Jacob Oller
    All We Imagine as Light
    Kapadia’s skill lies in her ability to interweave moments of hope into the anxiety. Her leads offer tenderness and pull back into self-protectiveness in equal measure.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 89 Jacob Oller
    Hit the Road
    The road trip always has to end, but the excellent Hit the Road introduces an exciting filmmaker whose journey is just beginning.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 79 Jacob Oller
    Sugarcane
    The documentary gives faces, names and histories to those affected by the residential schools—and looks, bracingly, towards a future where healing is possible.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 83 Jacob Oller
    Sorry, Baby
    Its fragmented literary structure and Victor’s captivating lead turn cohere theme, form, and content, melding the elliptical episodes into a canny representation of memory.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 91 Jacob Oller
    Train Dreams
    Train Dreams, at just 95 minutes before credits, is as efficient, accessible, and poignant as a good short story.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 67 Jacob Oller
    2000 Meters to Andriivka
    More damningly prosaic than the overwhelming chaos of a war movie’s climactic assault, 2000 Meters To Andriivka marches through death by a thousand unknowns. There’s still heartstopping terror and momentary poetry in this toil.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 75 Jacob Oller
    Familiar Touch
    As Chalfant preens, jokes, and carries on throughout her character’s evolving mental landscape, she threads recognition and persistence into a performance defined by confusion. This approach contributes to the idea that our lives are not a single fading picture, but formed from a long series of imperfect snapshots—like how single frames, quickly played in succession, form the illusory whole of a film.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 74 Jacob Oller
    Mami Wata
    A few key performances and a filmmaker with a clear vision unite for a film that truly feels fantastical, like someone somehow snuck a camera as they were falling into a holy reverie.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Jacob Oller
    Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
    Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is more than Boseman’s performance, sure, with Davis and Domingo going on some delicious tears of their own and Wilson’s words continuing to sear and soar in equal measure. But Boseman’s ownership of the film, an Oscar-worthy snapshot of potential and desire, gives an otherwise lovely and broad tragedy something specific to sing about.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 85 Jacob Oller
    All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
    If you assent, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is endlessly rewarding, a tactile sense-memory tapestry of all the things that matter.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 67 Jacob Oller
    Flow
    Though initially revolving around the attention to detail that takes center stage when creating a world of silent naturalism, the script from Zilbalodis and Matīss Kaža sometimes overpowers the incredible showcase of light, color, and movement with out-of-place cartoonishness.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 91 Jacob Oller
    Resurrection
    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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Jacob Oller
    Fallen Leaves
    Bone-dry yet filled with yearning, Aki Kaurismäki’s Finnish rom-com is a charming tale of persistence amid chaos.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Jacob Oller
    The Moogai
    A standard-issue horror barely making the move from short to feature (it’s only around 80 minutes before credits), The Moogai is a scare-free blunt instrument, imprecise and uninterested in its own genre beyond its potential for metaphor.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 83 Jacob Oller
    Infinity Pool
    Infinity Pool’s inspired critique of this crowd is fierce and funny, its hallucinations nimble and sticky, and its encompassing nightmare one you’ll remember without needing to break out the vacation slideshow.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 Jacob Oller
    My Father's Shadow
    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.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Jacob Oller
    Dahomey
    Assessing this move from the perspective of the pieces themselves—including an elaborate carved throne, a towering statue of King Ghézo, and metallic markers of death—as well as the recipients of these revenants, Diop takes a brisk yet thoughtful look at whether even antiquities can go home again.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Jacob Oller
    West Side Story
    Shoot it loud and there’s music playing; shoot it soft and it’s almost like praying: Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story pumps the classic for exactly that, classicism, by milking the musical’s dynamics for maximum expressiveness. Its romance? At its most tender. Its dance? At its most invigorating and desperate. Its songs? As if “Maria” or “Tonight” needed another reason to stick in your head, they’re catchier than ever.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 Jacob Oller
    Close Your Eyes
    Throughout its examination of memory, identity, passion, and, of course, the movies themselves, Close Your Eyes is senescent cinema, defined by its maker’s age and by its preoccupation with how your priorities ebb and flow as you grow old.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 74 Jacob Oller
    Lakota Nation vs. United States
    This exciting formal approach, with its diverse selection of striking nature photography and archival sources, moves swiftly and effectively. Its more traditional talking heads, which the film relies on more as its focus shifts to the present and future, still bring power to the doc—letting people tell their own stories is never a bad thing—but can move more haltingly, dictated by the speakers’ thoughts.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 84 Jacob Oller
    The Fabelmans
    It’d be disrespectful to those left behind if you gave your art anything but your best shot. The Fabelmans makes the bargain look painful, self-centered and utterly joyful—a genius embracing his regrets and in so doing, reminding us of how lucky we are that we all pay some version of this price, for ourselves and for one another.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 83 Jacob Oller
    To a Land Unknown
    In its quiet reflection on the limited choices of those backed into a corner, the drama elegantly conveys how a people’s continued persecution not only starves, shoots, and bombs individuals, but erodes the solidarity of their whole.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 91 Jacob Oller
    In the Heights
    The exciting electricity of a non-white blockbuster cast becoming superstars before your eyes, the maximalist style of a modern smash updating its influences, the intertwining of hyper-specific and broad themes—Chu’s strengths and his cast soar, bringing In the Heights as high as its ever been. It’s the best Hollywood musical in years.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Jacob Oller
    The Great Escaper
    A compelling piece of straightforward true-crime that makes the most of its throwback form.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 83 Jacob Oller
    Universal Language
    To further dig into Rankin’s blending of the goofily left-field and the openly earnest, the message persisting through the dry punchlines is that to care for your neighbor, to care for all the oddities of home, is to care for yourself.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Jacob Oller
    Between the Temples
    Between the Temples is covered in these sores, full of stories that are funny from the outside and will be funny when told with hindsight. And it is funny. But it’s the honesty, our understanding of the how and the why behind these truthfully conveyed pains, that lodges Silver’s film in your heart.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Jacob Oller
    Soul
    Soul stuffs its playful optimism into a simple message and delivers it with colorful, endearing beauty.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Jacob Oller
    The Perfect Neighbor
    The documentary’s damning look at stand-your-ground laws and the ineffectiveness of police even when they’re doing everything “right” (because the body-cam footage that makes up this film wouldn’t exist if they thought they were doing something “wrong”) is awful and thorough, avoiding cliché through a devotion to fisheye footage. Its upsetting, explicit-bordering-on-exploitative access drives its points into the pit of your stomach.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Jacob Oller
    Turning Red
    An exceptional puberty comedy by way of Sanrio-branded Kafka, Turning Red’s truthful transformations are strikingly charming, surprisingly complex and satisfyingly heartfelt. And yes, so cute you might scream until you’re red in the face.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 34 Jacob Oller
    Poker Face
    The sparse action scenes are useless jumbles, tossing bodies in misblocked blurs of messy motion—like a human game of 52-card pickup—or encased in total darkness. If we can’t see anything, this gamble suggests, maybe we won’t think that what we see is bad.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 48 Jacob Oller
    The Lost King
    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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 87 Jacob Oller
    Hundreds of Beavers
    A multimedia extravaganza of frozen idiocy, Hundreds of Beavers is a slapstick tour de force—and its roster of ridiculous mascot-suited wildlife is only the tip of the iceberg.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 72 Jacob Oller
    Afire
    The careful control displayed throughout Afire allows its deep, elegant characterizations to persist through the narrative smog, long after the rest of the film burns away.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Jacob Oller
    Grand Theft Hamlet
    A making-of film fueled, like the Let’s Plays and livestreams it’s in conversation with, by the chaos of a plan gone wrong, Grand Theft Hamlet is equal parts charming and cheesy—both due to its experimental setting.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 79 Jacob Oller
    Black Box Diaries
    Its devastation is familiar. But because filmmaker Shiori Itō is both survivor and journalist, and recorded her own investigation into her assault in real time, the documentary becomes a thrilling testament to her exceptional, tenacious agency in the face of a hostile world.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 86 Jacob Oller
    Sator
    Sator’s dedication to its own nuanced premise, location and tense pace make it the rare horror that’s so aesthetically well-realized you feel like you could crawl inside and live there—if it wasn’t so goddamn scary.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 86 Jacob Oller
    Pig
    Part of Pig’s impactful, moving charm is its restraint. It’s a world only hinted at in 87 minutes, but with a satisfying emotional thoroughness.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 67 Jacob Oller
    From Ground Zero
    With little in way of organization, From Ground Zero can oscillate frustratingly between styles, artistic ambition, and production quality.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 79 Jacob Oller
    Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
    With its traditions captured in delicate, sweaty vignettes by filmmaker Anna Hints, Smoke Sauna Sisterhood’s anecdotes fill your lungs and engulf you, until its women’s secrets drip down your body.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 83 Jacob Oller
    Little Amélie or the Character of Rain
    Little Amélie submerges itself in fantastical ecstasy and melancholy with a magic all its own.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Jacob Oller
    A Hero
    Iranian master Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero spirals out a good deed to all its messy conclusions, providing fertile ground for the filmmaker’s command of aesthetic realism and closeknit interpersonal dynamics.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Jacob Oller
    Vulcanizadora
    As Potrykus’ unromantic Midwestern losers mature, so too does his filmmaking. But Vulcanizadora still feels like a natural progression of his slime-slacker milieu: At the movie’s heart, there’s still a ridiculous and upsetting idea, thrust upon desperate members of the lower-middle class, seen through to its tragicomic conclusion.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Jacob Oller
    Step
    Step may stumble over its own hurried pace (cramming months of school into montage after montage), but such a method is almost forgivable once you realize that the film is speeding towards an effective finale that will have you cheering no matter what.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 83 Jacob Oller
    Weapons
    Weapons rudely disrupts the illusion of suburban safety with impish delight and a fully stocked horror arsenal. It also addresses some of the magical thinking that incomprehensible tragedy can inspire in people who would otherwise never engage in it.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 83 Jacob Oller
    Tina
    Where What’s Love Got to Do with It was a midlife coming-of-age—a “Hello, here’s my story”—Tina is a redefining, empowering farewell that adds perspective as she tips her hat and has her happily ever after out of the limelight.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 83 Jacob Oller
    The Things You Kill
    Impotence and violence, two terrifying poles of threatened masculinity, rage throughout The Things You Kill, while its women more readily accept uncomfortable complexities.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 79 Jacob Oller
    Riders of Justice
    Though there’s a bit of a moral jumble to its ultimately productive deconstruction of the revenge movie and it’ll certainly never be a bedtime story, Riders of Justice still has a savvy lesson to impart to the grown-up children raised on the strong and silent type.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Jacob Oller
    A River Below
    A River Below is pure investigative journalism.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 89 Jacob Oller
    Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
    Furiosa is a film well-planned and deeply dreamed.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Jacob Oller
    Memoir of a Snail
    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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 58 Jacob Oller
    Come See Me in the Good Light
    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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 71 Jacob Oller
    Living
    While certainly not an epiphany like the original, Nighy makes Living worthwhile through sheer force of will. In the film’s picturesque, composed, nearly stagnant beauty, he finds something honest in repression.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Jacob Oller
    Divinity
    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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 85 Jacob Oller
    The Mitchells vs. The Machines
    It’s easy to feel as lost or overwhelmed by the flashing lights and exhilarating sights as the central family fighting on one side of the title’s grudge match, but it’s equally easy to come away with the exhausted glee of a long, weary theme park outing’s aftermath.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Jacob Oller
    A Thousand and One
    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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Jacob Oller
    Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
    More quaintly focused than the exuberant previous film, though with no shortage of eccentric characters or longwinded side stories, Wake Up Dead Man agreeably seeks answers both existential and earthly.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 89 Jacob Oller
    The Sparks Brothers
    The Sparks Brothers is a thorough and charming assessment and appreciation of an idiosyncratic band, and the highest praise you could give it is that it shares a sensibility with its inimitable musicians.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Jacob Oller
    Bad Press
    Through Ellis’ eyes, it’s impossible to stay uninvested. We watch, stomach bottoming out, as the law is repealed with a simple vote. We watch, sitting on our hands, as the new amendment is introduced.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 73 Jacob Oller
    King Coal
    King Coal might not be an invigorating, fire-lighting work like Harlan County, USA, but it is still a startling piece of anthropology: An expression of a place and a people, and their local god, ruler and captor.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 85 Jacob Oller
    Passages
    Passages is this close, painful, sexy twisting of the screws at its best, as Sachs and his frequent co-writer Mauricio Zacharias observe the havoc wreaked by a bisexual brat’s latest dalliance.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 69 Jacob Oller
    You Hurt My Feelings
    You Hurt My Feelings, which confronts middle-aged neuroses and creative anxieties with all the subtlety of a bestselling author with a new Twitter account, still finds warmth amid its middling dramedy.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Jacob Oller
    Arrebato (1979)
    A movie completely in the addictive thrall of cinema, unhealthily enamored with the act of creation itself, Arrebato is an unnerving and enthralling fetish empowered by its hedonism: Drugs, sex, beauty, nostalgia and a disillusioned disaffection with them all.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 79 Jacob Oller
    The Valet
    The Valet parks itself squarely between the lines of established genre tropes, but with such precision and flair that you can’t help but be charmed.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 76 Jacob Oller
    Brief History of a Family
    Crafted with such delightful suspense that you can’t help but smile as you squirm, Brief History of a Family pulls from plenty of genre influences (its have/have-not friction and affluent apartment confines will be familiar to Parasite fans) to construct a tight dramatic metaphor encompassing Chinese parenting values and the end of a sociopolitical era.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 86 Jacob Oller
    Other People's Children
    Other People’s Children doesn’t merely focus on a woman weighing her options when it comes to the prospect of motherhood; it also exemplifies the myriad ways that we can foster genuine, compassionate bonds with kids—particularly those acting outside the “parent” label.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 65 Jacob Oller
    Gasoline Rainbow
    While the youth are still game to rebel, the film’s calculated spontaneity leaves its travelers stranded in search of something real, an ironically contrived quest whose very undertaking undermines its goal
    • 80 Metascore
    • 58 Jacob Oller
    Mr. Nobody Against Putin
    Plenty of the film feels vital—its observations of a nation’s shifting attitude towards war, towards hate, is crushing and familiar.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 76 Jacob Oller
    Mank
    Mank might not nearly live up to its subject’s crowning achievement, but it’s still a dense and enjoyable cinematic rant that would make its central lout proud.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 83 Jacob Oller
    Architecton
    Architecton acknowledges that everything we do is fleeting. There’s meaning in that. But it also posits that putting thought and respect into our temporary, tiny changes to Earth—laying fertile foundations that can roll with the punches that will always come—has a higher virtue.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 83 Jacob Oller
    Feels Good Man
    Feels Good Man’s greatest strength is affirming that even the most lighthearted things are worth fighting for. Even when it means buying a suit and going to court to protect your frog-man.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 67 Jacob Oller
    The Naked Gun
    That stupid-smart mix of clunkers, wordplay, old-school set-ups, prop humor, and left-field ideas that the writers just couldn’t stop laughing at doesn’t inherently make for a comedy classic—especially as a late plot escalation draws attention to the dull sheen shining over much of the film—but it does prove how effective these films’ formula can be when followed properly.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 72 Jacob Oller
    Girls Will Be Girls
    Sometimes her script devotes too much ink to reinforcing ideas already well-established by her images, and sometimes her dialogue can veer towards flowery YA conversations. But Talati’s made a gripping and beautiful debut, filled with reasons to watch her next movie.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 74 Jacob Oller
    Monster
    Monster’s mystery is one only in the ways that all of our experiences are inherently mysterious to others; its drama is devastating, a tragically inevitable snowball rolled by this existential loneliness; its warmth is gloriously defiant of this fate.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 67 Jacob Oller
    The Plague
    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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 78 Jacob Oller
    The First Slam Dunk
    The First Slam Dunk, with familiar characters, an innovative art style, and a narrative that’s helped structure an entire subgenre of anime, plays both sides of the court as it finds a delicate balance between flash and fundamentals.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 84 Jacob Oller
    Kokomo City
    Hilarious, scary, tragic and sometimes flat-out jaw-dropping, Kokomo City is a gripping and accessible dissection of modern life, told through a brutally specific point of view.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 67 Jacob Oller
    Twinless
    As its characters make bad choices, some foolish, some perverse, and some truly Machiavellian, Twinless sticks with the absurd emotional catastrophe that follows. That dedication to the mess it’s made is often captivating, even when the film’s intentional line-blurring between comedy, romance, and gaslighting thriller never reaches the heights of its twin-centric sources of inspiration, like Brian De Palma.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Jacob Oller
    Lurker
    Of course things get out of control—it’s not like the dark underbellies of music-world organizations haven’t always exceeded our worst expectations. The strength of Lurker, though, is when it’s operating as a slick, slimy social-engineering thriller that anyone could relate to.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 59 Jacob Oller
    Speak No Evil
    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.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 33 Jacob Oller
    Balls Up
    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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Jacob Oller
    birth/rebirth
    Moss’ creation is more than a sentient pile of parts with a fresh coat of mortuary makeup: It’s a savvy, gross, black-hearted gem with a humanity all its own.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 74 Jacob Oller
    Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
    Blessed/cursed with a charmingly unwieldy title (To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar comes to mind), Good Luck to You, Leo Grande can bobble the more dramatic elements of the pair’s professional and personal relationship, but its feel-good story satisfies to completion.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 58 Jacob Oller
    Enys Men
    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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Jacob Oller
    Shuffle
    It’s 81 damning minutes of tight filmmaking, great storytelling, and riveting investigation.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Jacob Oller
    Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain
    In truth, this isn’t a movie about understanding why—a question that desperately wants an easy answer to a complicated problem—but about understanding Bourdain. Appreciating him. Mourning him. To that end, Roadrunner succeeds once the mythologizing dies down and we see the person inside the romantic.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 86 Jacob Oller
    The Summit of the Gods
    The Summit of the Gods’ complex storytelling and convincingly lovely vistas make its philosophical case well: Whether you’re risking it all to get to a peak, to get to the bottom of a mystery, or to create a painstaking piece of animation, you’re lucky enough to have something you love.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Jacob Oller
    The Chronology of Water
    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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 67 Jacob Oller
    The Ballad of Wallis Island
    This fable’s push to meet, then fix, your heroes can still sound as saccharine as a solo acoustic set, but it’s smart enough to undercut itself early and often.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 79 Jacob Oller
    The People's Joker
    It’s a funky, janky, raw piece of autobiography, masquerading as the only thing the film industry makes anymore: A superhero movie. The riotous and weaponized result is everything the corporate use of the Joker isn’t, and everything it could be.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 71 Jacob Oller
    The Eight Mountains
    Brilliant landscape photography and two pairs of poignant performances elevate the drama to an enjoyable distance above sea level.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 87 Jacob Oller
    A Love Song
    A Love Song’s a brief and pretty little thing—less than 90 minutes—with the warm melancholy of revisiting a memory or, yes, an old jukebox love song. Walker-Silverman displays a keen eye, a deep heart and a sense of humor just silly enough to sour the saccharine.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 72 Jacob Oller
    Limbo
    A return to form for writer/director Ivan Sen—an Indigenous Australian filmmaker whose 2013 movie Mystery Road, its sequel and its miniseries spin-off all deal with similar subject matter—this cold-case thriller hacks through its genre clichés and Christian symbolism early so we can appreciate its charming, somber core.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 71 Jacob Oller
    Fancy Dance
    The intimacy of the narrative reveals how the script influences Tremblay’s direction rather than the other way around.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Jacob Oller
    Above and Below
    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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 85 Jacob Oller
    Longlegs
    Precisely crafted and just odd enough to disarm you, allowing its evil to fully seep in, Longlegs is a riveting tale of influence and immersion.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 67 Jacob Oller
    Urchin
    Despite his confident and unfussy direction, Dickinson owes most of Urchin‘s success to his lead actor, Frank Dillane.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Jacob Oller
    Project Hail Mary
    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.
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