Jacob Oller

The crossdressing, androgynous heroine, whose internal struggle around binary gender roles still feels fresh, grounds the broad emotions and classic, over-the-top aesthetic permeating the film.

The terrible script so often steals the spotlight that the gory, by-the-numbers filmmaking putting it into action is almost besides the point. Sandberg, for his part, can stage an effective horror sequence.

Despite remaking much of that film (Taisei Iwasaki and Yuma Yamaguchi’s tense score being one of the most successful throwbacks), Bullet Train Explosion abandons the complicating human factors that gave the original its soul. It makes the same mistake as so many modern blockbusters: confusing bigger, louder, and simpler with better.

The sequel sticks Affleck and Jon Bernthal in a sitcom episode surrounded by a Sound Of Freedom-style macho fantasy—call it Gun Sheldon. It’s a terrible combination that buries the rapport of its leads in chaotic action, troubling worldviews, and increasingly generic plotting.

A mix of blatant formula and complete oddity, the film is a failed recipe with plenty of seasoning.

This boneheaded movie’s got a dull point, but at least a lot of rich jerks get murderized by fanged, stab-happy unicorns.

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.

True to its inspirations, Ash offers up a formal mix between traditional sci-fi filmmaking and frequent first-person segments (either through pseudo-body cam footage or more explicitly video game-like bouts of point-of-view panic) that gives the familiarity a bit more energy than your average knock-off.

Sometimes it’s so bad it’s almost entertaining, but mostly you can hardly see the screen because each frame induces an eye-squeezing cringe.

But as that film approaches 90 years old, Disney made a remake that looks 100 times worse—and, necessarily, has been updated in an attempt to tell a more human tale. Aside from coating the story in a sickly “live-action remake” sheen, like dipping a juicy red apple in a vat of poison, Snow White also pads out its plot so that the character at the center actually has a character, that her love interest is more than a randy stranger in the woods, and that her foe’s villainy is more political than mythic. But the extra half-hour is just as muddled as the misguided classic elements, all of which forge a tarnished tiara to which Rachel Zegler is the single crown jewel.

Hallow Road really thrives when at its most simple. Sticking with Pike and Rhys in a simple windshield shot, cutting only to other tight, static angles from inside the car, allows the pair to carry the film.

The Day The Earth Blew Up could honestly stand a bit more of that madness.

Though the simplest pleasures of Favor remain—catty chemistry between Kendrick and Lively, loopy twists, bravura statement outfits—the heat powering the concept has cooled to the extent that, despite the increased body count, the sequel feels as perfunctory as its title. It’s just Another one.

Messy as it is, the filmmaking so energetically delivers its acidic pessimism that it’s rarely unpleasant.

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.

Love Hurts proves that honest emotions aren’t everything; sometimes you can just buy yourself enough goodwill to get by with last-minute junk.

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

This blend of genres, aesthetics, realities, and virtual realities doesn’t all add up—or adds up a bit too neatly, as the script makes Conor’s hazy backstory unmistakably clear—but OBEX is still endearingly contained, passionately executed, and impressively unique.

Impotence and violence, two terrifying poles of threatened masculinity, rage throughout The Things You Kill, while its women more readily accept uncomfortable complexities.

It ends up like every other three-person romantic dramedy ends up, but at least Love, Brooklyn boasts competent players going through its motions.

The moments where these reluctant clients open up about their wholesome desires, their dreams of spending their lives with someone they can grow old appreciating, invigorate the unfocused film. The rest of the time is spent whirling around all the fascinating subtopics Feng brushes.

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.

It’s a pointedly strange experience, sometimes annoyingly so and sometimes unexpectedly crushing, but all enjoyably kooky depending on your tolerance for this kind of thing.

Blichfeldt’s film offers a R-rated counterpoint better than most “faithful” fairy tale adaptations.

Wolf Man rarely bares its teeth, opting instead for tail-tucked melancholy. Relatively absent of jumpy gotchas or relieving humor—though there is a slightly tongue-in-cheek moment involving a doggy door—the film relies on injecting its Gothic origins with a dose of modern dread. Dangers lurk outside the home, but could just as easily infiltrate it. The march of death could hasten its pace for anyone at any time, rendering those around them impotent.

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.

With little in way of organization, From Ground Zero can oscillate frustratingly between styles, artistic ambition, and production quality.

Schmaltz-heavy and wishlist-thin, That Christmas offers very little and doesn’t even have the self-awareness to include the receipt.