Jared Mobarak

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

It’s through these actors that we see how their characters process their pain above and below the façade created and understand why they’re incapable of looking beyond their tragic wealth of regret.

I’m sure Allen apologists will say that A Rainy Day in New York was built as a way of self-ridicule with Gatsby’s incredulity towards women always finding older men attractive and filmmakers preying upon ingénues, but nothing in the text suggests that it is.

This subject matter can be tough to traverse, but Lewis embraces the challenge and makes us wonder why he stopped acting in the first place.

It can be a bit too pandering at times when things that read visually and emotionally are also explained verbally, but I don’t think these moments ruin the effectiveness of the over-arching narrative propulsion. The central journey works quite well in motive and deception to hold our interest as far as discovering where it will all lead. From start to finish that trajectory kept me hooked.

The Lodgers reveals itself to be a beautiful gothic horror with a captivating truth mishandled in a desire to surprise more than resonate.

The script is sadly too shallow to bring everything together.

While the whole thing meanders with no destination, I’m going to hold my position in the middle because it looks fantastic. If nothing else this exercise in nihilism has given Keating an excuse to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.

No matter how effective Murphy (great in his first film role in four years) or Robertson is, the fact they are driven by external forces rather than internal can’t be ignored.

The potential to open things up with secondary characters like a prostitute who takes an inexplicable shine to Frank (Karolina Wydra’s Simone) and her obnoxious pimp Trip (Sean Owen Roberts) is there to capitalize on. Ku and Newman would rather cut that bait loose, however, and let Cage go wild instead. It’s a jarring tonal shift.

It’s stupid, mindless, and crude, but I laughed throughout and admittedly can’t wait to watch it again.

Sadly The Bye Bye Man lacks both surprise and intrigue despite possessing some promise via a wild opening.

The cinematic version of this children’s book retains an air of wonder steeped in simple resonate clichés for younger viewers enduring the same hardships as Milton Adams.

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.

Suspense moves to boredom, boredom to frustration, and frustration to ambivalence.

I need to therefore believe Judy Greer selected it as her directorial debut because she thought she could somehow infuse a little satire and approach highlighting examples of masculine vulnerability — a goal that was sadly not achieved.

While Noyce and Watts try their best to ramp up tension, Sparling’s foundation proves too flimsy to comply.

There are countless openings for the plot to take wild left turns and embrace its overt severity as entertainment, but Proud Mary would rather stay the course of its one-note trajectory and remain earnest in its desire to be taken seriously.

The whole is not without flaws and eventually falls prey to the “this was really an origin story” bid for sequels, but it is enjoyable.

While the execution of every weak excuse for a twist and turn is really the culprit behind Looking Glass‘ failure, I would be remiss to not point a finger at Cage too.

Rushed and full of cinematic artifice, Gallenberger and Torsen Wenzel‘s script reveals itself to be devoid of the naturalism the leads are desperately trying to supply.

Sometimes thrillers of the “youthful stalker hits the sexual jackpot” variety can at least be entertaining in an ironic way, but that’s unfortunately not the case here.

It becomes your basic genre thriller as a result with a straightforward race against the clock to escape before the time arrives for Christine to be sacrificed. But the script is anything but basic in that goal. On the contrary, Margolis, Morley, and Tish make it so convoluted that I wasn’t sure where relevance began and deflection ended.

There’s a cake and eat it too attitude wherein this new iteration of Hellboy wants to simultaneously be trashy and dramatic.

It’s extremely saccharine and obvious in its progression, but I’m not sure you can truly say it isn’t real where the emotion is concerned.

Inheritance might have benefited from its third act being a tad subtler, but I get the allure of throwing away nuance for splashy suspense.

You can’t deny its visual panache via immersive cinematography and production design. That it never embraces the supernatural element it teases is disappointing, but far from a dealbreaker.

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

So we’re left with a problematic façade that can’t avoid tainting the thought-provoking crime mystery unfolding beneath it.

While the film has some heartfelt exchanges of kinship and empathy, however, it is also punctuated by moments of abject despair. This is crucial to a core message that moves beyond the healing power of art towards the entitlement those who make it possess and those who serve as their subjects don’t.

I found myself rolling my eyes more than intrinsically caring about the figures on-screen.

The funny thing is, though, that it does somehow work despite its flaws. Its A-to-B propulsion added onto Maikranz’s environmental framework might be basic and familiar, but it gets us to the end without too much manipulation.

Atmosphere is paramount as it should be, but sadly it’s created almost solely from jump scares the prologue quickly numbs us towards as soon as things get going.

You quickly discover that even Soisson’s best intentions are ultimately hampered by half-baked execution throughout. So intent on providing red herrings, he never allows us to know anyone other than through two-dimensional labels like “soon-to-be-victim” and “potential killer”—sometimes simultaneously.

It’s absolutely exhausting.

There’s little here to conjure any excitement.

Honeyglue has a very good movie inside it, but decisions brought on by inexperience prevent it from sprouting its wings.

There’s no subversion of machismo then — just reinforcement.

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.

Your enjoyment is thus hinged on your ability to not care. Can you let the wild insanity be enough? I generally can and did for a large portion of Die in a Gunfight, but that still doesn’t make it more than a shallow lark to forget the minute you leave the theater.

There’s too much going on. Maybe if Fogelman had a season of television to delve into these characters’ connections and inject the vigor of Will’s chaotic mind into the quieter passages that follow, Life Itself could be great.

With a central conceit revolving around a possible alien invasion, it’s easy to perhaps be disappointed to learn the science fiction in Brian Ackley‘s latest film Alienated is relegated to the background. Much like Nacho Vigalondo’s Extraterrestrial, however, this can be a good thing.

This should be an intense ride to oblivion or perhaps even a satirical romp chock full of self-indulgent camp, but it proves to be neither.

It’s one thing if The Dark Below sought campy implausibility, but it craves legitimacy instead.

Lucky isn’t perfect as a person or a film, but there’s something fitting about this. Escape from his character’s situation won’t ever be clean and Kang ensures to never pretend it will.

Only when limbs literally start flying through the air did I truly find myself invested in what was onscreen. It’s too bad it came way too late.

The journey is ultimately as sweetly funny as it’s emotionally tragic.

Negri has a compelling tale to tell about life, death, and love — the execution is just too schizophrenic to earn our investment.

It’s a humorously tragic scenario that excels thanks to its performances.

They can get too caught up in characterizations that render each a bit one-note (Susan’s hippie sensibilities, Joe’s type-A machismo, Anna’s selfish resentment, and Tom’s martyrdom), but we forgive this reality because the story deals in contrasts. They’re intentionally opposites as couples and individuals for a reason.

At the end of the day a horror film is successful if it can make your heart pound out of your chest. And for most of Verónica, Plaza and Navarro do exactly that.

At a time when everyone’s aging parents and grandparents are proving how out of touch with the twenty-first century they are in politics, biases, and entitlement, these old friends still playing platform tennis every day after decades of competition on their Dorset, Vermont home’s courts reveal the opposite.

The result is a tense thriller with noir undertones revealing a more complex web than we ever could predict. Not every discovery is tough to guess, but each carries another question to distract us from a desire to pat ourselves on the back or presume we’ve cracked the case.

There’s simply too much happening with little to no purpose besides distraction from the task-at-hand to fill out the run-time.

This starts and finishes with Pashinyan’s faith in Armenians and they do not let him down.

Rather than get bogged down in action and conflict, Luchetti allows her characters the room to grow alongside each other with their own internal wars supplying more than enough intrigue until Manfredi finally knocks on the correct door.

It’s a beautifully intimate look at how a place can affect your identity and actions so wholly and how history is never just something you read.

Landfall is thus a depiction of hypocrisy, passionate rebellion, and promise for the future. Aldarondo isn’t naïve to the progress made, though. She doesn’t simply put all this information on-screen and declare things solved. They’re not.

Surreal comedy turns into surreal horror as hope buckles under futility’s weight.

People who like this type of film will have a blast while those who don’t are caught glancing at their watches in hopes the end is finally near.

Anxiety is high at the start of Jesse Noah Klein’s Like a House on Fire.

By documenting the struggle, Underplayed preserves the artists’ voices and shames the gatekeepers so history can’t be retroactively rewritten without receipts.

Anyone who watches this genre will be able to guess what’s happening fairly early. It therefore becomes about the character. Liking him makes the journey worthwhile.

By spending time with both sides, Five Years North (titled after the period of time many Guatemalans stay in the US en route to making money for a planned return) is able to foreground its big takeaway: privilege.

With excellent archival footage, first-hand accounts, animated portraits curated with relevant quotes, historians providing context, and the contemporary pursuit for justice, Rise Again proves itself to be an extensive deep dive into a subject that needs to be taught.

While there are a few twists and turns to keep things fresh, a low budget forces the action to remain dialogue-heavy and more or less focused on this single necessity. Never redundant, it can get a little bit slow.

There’s a way to let this new supernatural thriller co-exist with River’s emotional turmoil from start to finish as parallel interpretations of the same journey. Skye’s decision to segment them into two halves unfortunately prevents that marriage, leaving us to wonder if we’ve been led into a completely different movie as ambitions and motivations are turned on their head with zero regards towards where they originated.

Director Terence Krey and Nyland (who co-writes as well as stars) have crafted a horror film under the name of the aforementioned song An Unquiet Grave, so a return to happiness will inevitably be short-lived if it even arrives.

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.

It’s a heartfelt parable wrapped within a bloody and profane, 80s-aesthetic package.

Mazlo’s graphic design and animation background shines with a sort of elongated montage taking Alice from Beirut’s streets (guided by a woman dressed as the Lebanese flag’s cedar tree) to the diner where she meets Joseph and then through the years of them starting a family.

That this claustrophobic sci-fi thriller quickly won me over with its early David Cronenberg inspirations only allowed my excitement to increase with each passing minute as I found myself unable to detach from its captivatingly dark, timely pandemic mystery.

It’s so well-paced that the final twenty minutes hit with an urgency I wasn’t expecting.

To say The Swearing Jar is an uplifting film without a clarifier such as “bittersweet” is perhaps a tough sell, but that’s exactly what it is.

We’re witnessing a nuanced reorganization of priorities within both Dong-Hyun and So-Young at different speeds.

While Employee of the Month might start slow as it sets this stylistically heightened (yet completely believable) premise, it doesn’t take long for chaos to reign supreme.

Glowicki does a great job grounding things in the confused malaise of a woman suddenly devoid of ambition beyond finding that cat.

Tonal shifts will have some dismissing Uproar as slight, but I think its motives are strong enough to succeed regardless.

It’s an imperfect, singular ride through small-town suburbia with lightning-fast pacing that causes some segues to have you wondering if you missed a scene.

With potent performances and a gorgeous, textured aesthetic, The King Tide proves a mesmerizing experience above and below its surface.