Jared Mobarak

While the uncertain nature of the sport lends a suffocating tension to the whole, the complexity of [Morgan's] character’s day-to-day struggle as a man who knows nothing else does too.

Things get heavy pretty quick once the drugs take hold and not everyone will get out alive. While Klein lets that genre conceit cut some chaff for him, however, he doesn’t lose the overarching perspective that those who do narrowly get back home aren’t out of the woods.

The film doesn’t nail every beat . . . but what it gets right is unassailable.

Despite the underlying emotional complexity shared via triggered vignettes of memory, the film too often chooses to live in the present and thus within the love triangle it so desperately wants to subvert.

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.

What makes The Quarry compelling is the fact that we know from the start that Whigham isn’t a monster. His performance is too full of heartbreak and remorse for that to be true. This man is caught within a loop he knows he can stop if he only finds the courage to do so. It’s not easy.

It’s like we’re watching a self-serious episode of whatever random police procedural CBS airs each week with an impossibly odd perpetrator rather than the opposite. That’s why the start can feel boringly redundant despite what Chip’s ass is doing throughout. It’s also why flipping the switch so depravity can reign late still entertains.

These people are so greedily narcissistic that the best fun lies in what they’re willing to do to each other and how they react upon realizing that truth.

Hardiman takes special care to ensure her narrative is steeped in real world plausibility.

We Summon the Darkness reveals itself to be a fun ride when all is said and done because nobody on-screen knows what he/she is doing.

It means something to see activists in Wisconsin band together and dig for the truth even if the damage has already done its job. Dashed hope is still hope after all. Every example—failed or not—reminds us that we can fight again.

Things do get extra silly by the end, but the blackly comedic tone is consistent enough to allow for such a wild turn of events to feel at home nonetheless.

I have to give the filmmakers a ton of credit here because they walk themselves to a point of no return as far as where things are heading and they do not blink. They lift the curtain to briefly show us the horrors beneath the sterile walls of this prison and let them exist as inevitability rather than something that can be altered.

Poésy, Kerekes, and Röhrig steal many scenes with their emotional investment to their respective roles. Schweighöfer is easy to hate . . . and Eisenberg is effective yet again as a “genius” whose pragmatism borderlines on Asperger’s if not full-on misanthropy. If the story itself doesn’t grab your attention, their performances within should.

We learn everything there is to know about an entire country through the Heise family’s words. Some passages prove better than others, but none are inconsequential to the whole.

Inspired by his grandmother’s institutionalization for OCD and propelled by his own experiences having identified as both genders during his lifetime, writer/director Carlo Mirabella-Davis’ fictional feature debut Swallow provides its lead an escape through pica.

While things do ultimately get heavy-handed at times (Grace comparing Edward’s act to murder is one thing, him comparing it to the utilitarian sacrifice of war is another), it never gets boring.

Sheridan lends his role the necessary nuance it deserves and de Armas imbues hers with a wealth of unspoken pain, but neither effort receives its payoff. The film conversely squanders both instead.

A lot happens during the course of director Matthew Pope and co-writer Don M. Thompson’s Blood on Her Name … too much. This can prove problematic for what starts as a simple plot before things start turning convoluted real quick thanks to new revelations shedding light upon secrets and lies. Surprisingly, however, that perpetually escalating noise is justified.

The plot’s obviousness melts away because we’re having a genuinely great time as these flawed men grow ever so slightly with each passing minute. They feel real.

What’s mostly a vérité document of lead character Tina’s (Carlie Guevara) trajectory towards chemically transitioning from male to female despite being an undocumented immigrant in an expensive city like New York, Flavio Alves’ The Garden Left Behind is also a rather potent expression of humanity’s collective dysphoria.

McArdle and Brallier have thus rendered VFW an efficient us versus them scenario with Fred’s crew possessing an infectious, three-dimensional rapport opposite Boz and cronies leaning into their one-track yearning for a fix. Begos then brings the grainy and gritty aesthetic its predecessors possessed to really deliver a throwback vibe augmented solely by new advancements in violently realistic gore.

Nélisse and Pniowsky are a big part of the drama unfolding authentically with ample disdain and irritation respectively, but The Rest of Us truly is Graham and Balfour’s show.

Kroll is very good in a role that allows him to pivot away from his usual comic relief persona to be sweet and funny and complicated, but Pappas is even better as a woman unsure of her very identity outside of the sport to which she’s dedicated her entire life.

The result is at once empowering . . . heart-wrenching . . . and inspirational.

While Avnet’s film is effective melodrama, it’s hardly a completely honest depiction of what happened.

There are no sides when it comes to appreciating soldiers like William Pitsenbarger—only awe. Rather than epitomize a great military man, he exemplifies what it is to be a great human being. That’s why his story can change the priorities of a man like Huffman and why those he barely knew can dedicate their lives to his honor.

The Wave is more interested in supplying a good time and that should be enough for some.