Jared Mobarak

Gifted proves cutely endearing and effectively poignant if not especially memorable in any “everyone needs to see it” way.

It might be hyperbolic to call Smallfoot the most dangerous film of the year, but it wouldn’t necessarily be wrong.

These characters are sufficiently complex and intertwined to remain interesting, but how they interact can be uninspiring.

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.

It doesn’t take much to write or perform an explosive scene of unmitigated furor. It does to balance it with the empathy to know it comes from a place of fear. The acting is a huge piece to that puzzle because none of this works without believing Almut and Tobias are soulmates.

It’s wild to think that Merritt has never acted before because he commands our attention with a mix of charismatic comedy and a sobering display of optimism in the face of annihilation.

There’s also some commentary about twenty-first century technology and cellphone culture, but I don’t think Taylor goes far enough to make it more than throwaway insight soon forgotten for crazed violence. As far as the latter goes, Mom and Dad delivers crazy in an exciting way that never bores.

The journey is nuanced and subtle, though, just like its science-fiction premise. So don’t expect a thrill a minute.

No one can be trusted. No one is assured of their survival. We don’t even know who we should be rooting for––beyond the filmmakers themselves, in hopes they stick the landing.

It’s a shame because McDermott effectively toes the line between dorky and menacing (before the film explains which is real), Plummer is great playing with a loaded deck of anxieties and insecurities, and Beaty performs her role perfectly until the writing abandons what made her necessary.

I wonder if the budget was perhaps too small to overcome since every moment The Djinn appears ready to transcend, it tragically deflates. Or perhaps its conceit deserved short film status instead. Going beyond twenty minutes simply isn’t viable.

Sagal delivers a captivating antagonist as a result. By possessing so many possible motives, we can’t help but wonder where sanity and intent diverge.

We need more unrelenting work like this to use as catharsis for a youth put in peril by the inaction of aging politicians. Riot Girls proves just as much about a new generation taking the reins as it does empowered women expunging toxic male entitlement.

While the intent for gender equality is welcome, the execution subverts that goal.

There’s some gnarly imagery that comes once, in Good Madam‘s second half, the supernatural takes over from the historical and characters find themselves falling into the trance of larger, systemic issues plaguing our world for millennia. But the beginning is just as tense and anxiety-inducing in its more normal sense of reality.

Crampton and Fessenden are great in their respective roles both when the drama asks them to grab our attention and the comedy asks them to goof around

Moonlight is a quietly introspective depiction steeped in unparalleled honesty of the ways in which we’re saved and damned throughout our lives.

This is a film of philosophical rumination as its hopeful characters find themselves living in an imperfect world of their own creation.

All four main actors deliver great performances.

These kids might not have a full grasp on the situation that’s unfolding, but they definitely understand how precarious things have become in order to exit their shells. They awaken their desires while the adults gradually shutdown, knowing that nothing will ever be the same again.

Letting the “monsters” dispatch each other lets our “heroes” retain their fear and expendability — they can die when you least expect it because they aren’t our only means towards victory. This universal animosity keeps things interesting so the battles can be short and sweet without any monologues extending the opportunity for table turning.

[Evrenol’s] success lies in the entertainment value this death-ravaged orgy supplies and it has plenty to go around.

While Sól’s trajectory is the plot’s main thrust, she’s really a conduit to a vérité depiction of life’s myriad complexities.

McHale and Bishé are the ones who carry things because only they (like us) are aware of the sinister goings on beneath their over-the-top lust and the increasingly transparent surrealist nightmare entrapping them. Their dynamic is simultaneously an impossible ideal and an authentic reality to aspire towards. Mankind’s unwitting heroes.

A tense journey of psychological despair.

Stone doesn’t care about Snowden as much as he does the ramifications of what his employers accomplished. He’s focused on the future, fearful the next person over-stepping boundaries is Donald Trump. This doesn’t make the film a resounding success, but it does make it fascinating.

A just world would place [Bell] in the awards conversation, but ours will probably not give Skin the platform necessary for that to happen.

Green and Fonacier are both fantastic within this evolving dynamic, their inevitable end a mutually brutal sacrifice meant to close a broken loop rather than continue some damaging cycle. Their characters are so complex that their best moments are those subtle shimmers revealing true natures beneath old façades.