John Fink

While the film never quite elevates itself to a harmonious balance of camp and art house, The Empty Man doesn’t lack ambition.

A film such as this lives and dies by its leads, and both are wonderful on-screen together, creating a realistic love story that works well as they navigate the situation they both find themselves in.

Nothing Stays The Same is an important piece of Austin history with great performances but it feels as though director John Sandmann respectfully stuck to too narrow a mandate.

House Party is fun enough but feels like a missed opportunity.

What initially starts as a light-hearted look at YouTube star David Dobrik and his “Vlog Squad” evolves into a portrait that doesn’t quite know what to make of him and his enablers.

Fast Color, like A Wrinkle in Time, provides an empowering message without much to latch on to. Hart, who impressed with her debut drama Miss Stevens, offers a banal, tired narrative, despite strong performances and occasionally beautiful visuals.

Instead of sinking in, I found myself yearning for the classics it has either been influenced by or is borrowing heavily from. If this were a more academic exercise it should have come with an extensive works cited page.

The film problematically never quite commits to being one thing: bouncing around the investigation, being work of advocacy, and a study of family violence. In doing so, it lacks the kind of emotional impact and outrage it ought to have.

Well-directed and fun, if not a bit too long and perhaps concerned with a plot that’s not nearly as engaging as its leads, Vampire Academy is a little smarter than your average teen adventure, but it’s certainly not Heathers or Mean Girls.

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is a funny-enough summer comedy that never quite breaks free from the countless raunchy iterations that have come before it.

Zhu brings a great deal of sympathy to her performance, yet her directorial debut somehow feels a bit hollow, disconnected by design.

The film’s final revelations are underdeveloped and underwhelming, wrapping up events neatly in a way that lacked the humor of earlier scenes.

XX plays with and pushes back against certain tropes at its very best, yet never truly breaks much new ground.

This isn’t quite a nuanced study in violence, despite its title. Shot in northern rural Ontario, Canada in a generic backwoods called White Pines, the film ultimately feels hollow despite the deliberate cinematography by Pierce Derks.

Do Not Resist attempts to present a fair inquiry of police’s use of force. The issue itself is fraught with conflict and, unfortunately, the interest of immediacy of the conversation seems to trump thorough journalism.

Upon a first glance, the film is somewhat hollow an experience, offering trite dialogue and an on-the-nose message about beauty and the horrors of genetic engineering taken to their extreme.

I admire the tenacity and fearlessness of Wood to take on these issues head-on. In a playground of stripped-down indies of rough edges, encouraging sparse narratives, understatement and minimalism, Elizabeth Wood has made a film that feels fresh even if it offers little introspection and commentary on the fire that it plays with. And thus is the flaw of White Girl.

The inescapable problem at the core of any omnibus or anthology film with multiple cooks in the kitchen is, by all design, things will be uneven. Yet V/H/S/99 is fun enough in the context of TIFF’s Midnight Madness—including standouts from the usually gross and reliable Flying Lotus and Johannes Roberts, whose film is genuinely terrifying before turning a bit silly in its final moments.

In trying to capture the current state of the exhibition industry, there’s simply too much left unsaid, either for legal reasons or editorial choices.

Ambitious and deeply flawed, Acrimony may appeal to hardcore fans of The Room–it’s not every day a melodrama comes along that’s this fun precisely because it never takes itself seriously.

Mohammed Ali Naqvi’s Hanging by a Wire is not without thrills and human drama. Yet it seems focused more on a death-defying rescue than on what could be done to prevent this from happening again.

Pretty Problems explores several interesting themes but never quite knows what to make of Jack and Lindsay, their new friends, or the help that enables them. It feels conceived from within its own bubble, where money can in fact buy you almost anything you want except for a sense of fulfillment if you don’t know exactly what’s desired.

Fronted by a fine performance by Matt Smith, Mapplethorpe plays it safe with a subject that’s anything but.

Fresh Kills gets much of the atmosphere and tone right, and at its best is an evocative character study of mob wives and daughters; A’zion lends a particularly fascinating performance as a tough-willed woman ready to stand her ground and look out for “her people.”

The film is restrained — this is not a reality TV hit job — but the problem is that it glosses over many interesting parts of Anderson’s life while he goes on a type of soul-searching tour. It is as if the film was not part of the soul-searching, but more or less an ancillary annoyance for him.

Patriots Day may, in fact, embrace the spirit of the days following the bombing, but the scattered framing leaves one wanting more.

The Boss Baby is a run-of-the-mill offering from DreamWorks who have prioritized frantic action and one-liners over the rich complexity of its competition.

Despite overstaying its welcome through one absurd action sequence after another, it knows exactly what it is: an action movie your uncle would have liked after receiving on VHS from Columbia House. It’s just skillful enough to keep one engaged as we witness otherwise dull archetypes escape one tense situation after another.