Jared Mobarak

Utilizing the style he honed as Terrence Malick’s editor and on his directorial debut The Better Angels, Edwards supplies Richie’s inner turmoil through poetic imagery.

It’s often inspiring.

Tinnell captures the warmth of kinship and tradition while displaying the truly unique immigrant experience of putting down roots and working to improve life for future generations. We should all aspire to experience that much love because nothing calls out its absence more than remembering its abundance.

Dale is a force as he runs the full spectrum of emotions to reveal why he matters and why he must also be forgotten.

Despite the filmmakers investing so much time in unnecessary biopic exposition, the whole is an exciting and informative history lesson.

It deserves every accolade and opportunity received due to its unrelenting authenticity and complex themes.

For all its redundancies—the film enjoys telling us its definitions of sequel, remake, and reboot while also highlighting the myriad ways it knowingly embodies each—this authentic character growth is wholly new.

Low Tide isn’t groundbreaking or unique, but it knows its setting and characters enough to make the journey authentic despite its lack of surprises.

Loro has a ton of style and effective performances across the board.

With an unhinged Weaving chewing the scenery as Nix and a perfectly cast Radcliffe doing his best to survive while also finding it impossible to keep Miles’ snarky thoughts in his brain out of his mouth, it’s hard not to be entertained.

This is powerful stuff that transcends time and place despite the production design being impeccably executed.

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.

This is a very personal story to Marder and it shows in the intricate ways he uses sound to place us within Ruben’s plight.

Rather than have the plot manipulate his characters, Johnson lets them manipulate it. That’s an extremely rare Hollywood feat.

This is a very quiet and contemplative film driven by characters above plot.

Benson and Moorhead removed all excess—great for propulsion, but a detriment to investment. Actions become almost robotic at times as their inclusion is more about advancement than character building.

So even though the whole can feel a bit cutesy at times, there’s real weight beneath that façade.

Iannucci is picking and choosing our alignments for us with his desire for as much humor as possible. Devoid of the breadth necessary to make these characters more than comic relief, however, it becomes difficult to buy the pursuit of David’s victory above all others.

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.

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

It’s an interesting glimpse at his process with Buñuel doing despicable things alongside beautiful ones.

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.

López’s fairy tale is one seeking to remind us of an innocence not yet stripped clean.

A big part in combating the otherwise obvious plotting and overt coincidences beyond their family-friendly messaging is that Dreyfus commits to this performance.

Its effective visceral hold on our imagination guarantees its inevitable cult status.

Sword of Trust proves an enjoyable curio of eccentrics getting themselves in way over their heads.

These two couples are literally here to be targets and are thus more frustrating than not whenever they unsurprisingly escape the multiple harrowing moments of homicidal fun.

The events onscreen are semi-autobiographical for Sama and thus a document of the turmoil those his age at the time faced when external expectations and internal hopes clashed. At its center: love. The power it has to bring us together opposite its potential to tear us apart.