Jared Mobarak

So much of Concrete Valley adopts a quiet, almost off-putting awkwardness that you’ll either embrace or not.

It’s all over the place in tone, themes, and cringeworthy melodrama.

The film is playing with familiar tropes along a formulaic path, but it’s simply too endearing to dismiss outright.

The whole gets somewhat tiring, considering few (if any) scripts could sustain the level of insanity met when it’s at its best. Anything not dialed to eleven becomes noticeably dull by comparison.

Iliff’s script and Hughes’ direction might not provide anything we haven’t seen before, but both allow the actors the necessary room to give us what we need to stay invested.

The film’s simply a bit off-kilter—written with influences blatantly on its sleeves yet uninterested in subverting any assumptions that fact guarantees. I must be missing something.

Braun and Martin make some interesting choices and craft a gorgeous-looking film on an obviously shoestring budget, but none of that matters when my one wish was for these characters to never see each other again.

With a sprawling cast of familiar faces, Murder at Yellowstone City reveals itself as character-driven from the start.

This is a very slow-moving work that leans heavily on auditory scares rather than visual ones, the whole akin to sleep-deprivation torture.

Ratcheting up the conflict and confusion becomes counter-intuitive, the escalation of violence and brutality arriving without clear motive. I can’t even decide for myself what’s happening—there’s nothing but smoke to grab. Owen stripped away the film’s own agency.

A film full of thought-provoking ideas that never quite gel into anything more than another example of missed potential.

It’s not laugh-out-loud funny, but I was smiling for the duration, and its subversions of certain archetypes (see Noah Urrea’s Clay) kept things marginally fresh. Good and bad, it met expectations.

As soon as the tone moves from drama to comedy, all the work that was done showcasing Ken’s emotional fragility—e.g. a great pattern built by morning coffee and the fluctuating ratio between caffeine and milk revealing how frayed he’s become—is wiped clean.

Where the narrative’s bookends highlight the psychological and emotional toll of what happens (along with the whys), the bulk of the runtime is spent pretending as though the survival aspect of the journey is as captivating.

If Walker has some interesting ideas and an eye for panache, the whole leaves much to be desired.

The Fan Connection is a bit rough around the edges as far as production value goes due to its shoestring, one-woman show budget helped only by a Kickstarter campaign during post-production, but don’t let that deter you from seeing the heart and humanity present in every single frame.

The unfortunate truth of the matter is that, like this duo’s supplies, returns diminish with every passing day.

Kruger and Nyong’o elevate the material to a level it probably doesn’t deserve with Chastain and Cruz following closely behind.

Perhaps that’s the point: selfish men do selfish things while the people they love pay the price. That’s a lesson. And it might have worked if not for the sunny, hopeful air of its surrounding package. South of Heaven isn’t dark enough to buy that as its intent.

It’s messy and overly convoluted, but the ends do mostly justify the means.

It’s a compelling journey often rendered inert by quick transitions from one tragedy to another.

It’s light, absurd, and very low-stakes.

Pearce and Barton set up this heavy emotional narrative dealing with mental illness, PTSD, and familial love only to undercut it with loud overtures of systemic violence devoid of textual basis.

Its mere existence is a win, though. As is its ability to galvanize Lucy and Shaw’s relationship to help steer them through a third act that resonates on a frequency the rest couldn’t approach. It’s a testament to Plaza and Caine’s performances, too, since they are finally able to shake free of the hyperbolic hamming and prove why they were cast in the first place.

We might still miss Sorrentino’s prior, more unforgiving tone, and his sleek filmmaking style; it’s arguable this material doesn’t mine the best of his strengths.

While the concept remains sound as the backdrop for a frustrated public defender choosing the riskier road less traveled to make his mark and a difference when every other version of himself would balk, it has us believing the surreal visual anomalies sprinkled amidst the heist have purpose beyond superficial thematic reinforcement.

Our enjoyment of her quest for blood thus hinges more upon how fun we consider the humor Wascha and Wexler provide than the action itself.

Hirsch is good, albeit a bit over-the-top. As is Fox, especially when busting Willis’ balls for being too much of a “coward” to take the risks she’s only too willing to tackle. And Haas is probably the best of them all as the monster hiding in plain sight.