Jared Mobarak

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

Just let the rage unleash in whatever convenient way is necessary to get the blood flowing faster. What’s good enough for John Wick should be good enough for Kill, so wake the boogeyman up and let him loose. Because we’re all here for the brutality anyway. There’s no point pretending otherwise.

Schaad really ensures that we’re seeing beyond the surface. We’re experiencing the characters, their respective journeys, and their somber realizations that some incongruities can’t be fixed with a Band-Aid.

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

Yes, there’s a central romance that sees Howard and the new housekeeper Annie (Brid Brennan) falling in love, but its purpose is less to fix what’s broken than it is to shine a light on the fact that some things can’t be fixed.

That authenticity captivates. Seagrass understands that these couples’ retreats aren’t for everyone and that some marriages aren’t either.

Bennett is wonderful as always. Her ability to show strength through vulnerability is unparalleled.

By letting the horrors to come unfold in all their uncensored brutality, Dear Jassi forces those who would rather dismiss such situations as not being their problem to experience the violence being done in God’s name firsthand.

It’s a very funny romp with a fantastic comedic performance by Pednekar.

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

Rustin still has its Oscar-bait moments and doesn’t necessarily take any big swings that might risk mainstream appeal, but it’s a solid drama and above-average profile, nonetheless. And if you get nothing else out of it but a cursory education on Bayard Rustin the man as well as an acting clinic from Domingo and Glynn Turman, even that should be enough.

Despite there being zero surprises from start to finish as it fulfills its mass-marketed, for-profit formula, Next Goal Wins never talks down to us. It ensures its characters learn from their mistakes and that any mean-spiritedness is exposed as being about the giver rather than the receiver.

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.

It definitely won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but those who get on its frequency should have a whale of a time.

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

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

When the entire cast embraces the self-deprecating nature needed to lean into the stereotypes while also calling them out, it’s impossible not to climb onboard via comedy alone. If the twists and turns are hardly shocking, that bluntness is the point.

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.

Sable becomes a nexus point of preservation and destruction. Lucas captures it all as data while Mills unleashes the artistry of those numbers courtesy of sight and sound. Beauty lives in death. Suffering is born from life. Everything is connected.

While Star and An fantasize and joke about wishing they could become trophy wives of old, their roads are not paved in gold. Having each other sitting shotgun, however, does make the trip a whole lot brighter.

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

Emma and Josh are experiencing this weird journey together just like they did the enriching if celibate one before it. And we want them to come out the other side stronger even as they spiral out of control.

Schaefer and Lawler pack their rounded vignette of full-frame 16mm film with contradictions, thematic mirrors, and unexplainable phenomena that confounds in its beauty just as easily as it enlightens through its complexity.

Abbott and Qualley unload everything from physical to emotional to psychological abuse, both roles desperate to solidify their respective superiority and restore the status quo. Rediscover balance by admitting their desires. Who knows? They might just fulfill them too.

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.

Therapy Dogs is undeniably authentic, regardless of whether some sequences are staged: as each fiction unfolds we understand the emotions and futility that birthed them.

That’s the fun of it all: complete unpredictability.

While it’s not as overtly comedic as Stevens’ Jakob’s Wife, A Wounded Fawn is funny in its own way.