Jared Mobarak

The style isn’t necessarily inferior to Studio Ghibli—it’s just different.... But once the shift in plot occurs to add drama, the visuals change as well.

Its characters are unforgettably batty yet impressively noble...sympathetic yet fierce.... And their actions consistently achieve dramatic merit despite always culminating with a joke.

By letting the cast improvise their reactions through the lens of their experiences, Esparza finds truth instead. By highlighting Bleechington and Williams’ performances, he exposes how injustice is the new “normal” and how the consequences of one’s misfortunate reverberate well beyond him/herself.

The Legend of Molly Johnson never feels like anything but a cinematic experience.

The pace might be slow, but it allows some great performances to breathe.

Maskell is great in the title role.

If there’s one thing to take from watching Tony engage with his own past, it’s the gleeful delight he shows when talking about rejection. He wore every instance that viewers didn’t like what he made as a badge of honor.

Bielenia delivers a fantastic performance as his character overcomes insecurities and regret to speak the words he knows from experience can help those who’ve lost their way.

The humor enhances this drive by lightening the weightiness of the Lunsfords’ struggle as well as endearing them as a relatable group not so different from our own families regardless of our personal issues possibly not matching their immense tragedy.

For every person who finds the tone a welcome inclusion that helps make this two-and-a-half-hour mystery feel a whole lot breezier than you expect, there’s bound to be another who cannot separate what appears to be surface distraction from a highly convoluted tapestry of convenient twists and turns. Most will surely fall in the middle––like me.

All four main actors deliver great performances.

McCabe’s goal for his film is to show the chaos objectively and thus not take sides or betray the reality of just how corrupt this fight proves. He places hubris, dignity, fear, and courage onscreen—raw and unfiltered.

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.

Pryce and Holder are perfectly suited to the roles and form an authentic chemistry that excels above workplace formalities.

Everything has a purpose, from the deer whistle to a clearing of bleached white skulls, as modern medicine diagnoses that which our minds can safely process while our eyes warn us about how much worse things might be outside the realm of science.

Cage is having the time of his life playing the role––flippant, unhinged, oozing the confidence of a man with nothing to lose.

This hard-boiled noir is the real deal.

Bad Education is a roller coaster ride from start to finish as the surface sheen of success is peeled back to reveal the proverbial bodies buried to achieve it.

It’s even more fun digging into the tales on-screen if you’re familiar with the pop culture appropriation.

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.

The film becomes a document of Ola’s lost innocence, hardening her to the reality that faith only gets us so far.

Grashaw’s ability to keep everything moving through that thick air of uncertainty is the film’s best attribute because it does feel like we’ve gone off-track more than once after chapter one (there are three, one for each sibling).

This trilogy secures our respect as a crowning achievement in animated cinema that should stand the test of time.

I think Gough’s performance is easy to discount because she’s often seen in the background, but she delivers an unforgettable descent into anguish and grief.

Violence becomes both a weapon and a tool throughout the proceedings while words do the same since both must sometimes be wielded as the former in order to be successful as the latter.

The seasoned director does a good job mixing in some kinetic action too, whether a high-speed car chase or multiple instances of one person desperately trying to shake off his/her assailants in pursuit.

This is a political film. If Olga’s pursuit of her Olympic dream is often narratively truncated, what it means to be in Switzerland while loved ones remain in Kyiv, risking their lives at the protests, isn’t.

The result is entertaining satire with a dark edge of relatable excitement.