Jordan Hoffman

The Michelle Yeoh fronted spin-off movie Section 31 is 100 minutes of generic schlock containing only trace elements of Star Trek.

It is a rather sly affair, slipping in some genuine food for thought amongst its snickering.

What Meadowland refuses to do, to its great credit, is conform to expectations.

It’s unfortunate that Byrne’s offering such a tremendous performance in a film that is, to put it as bluntly as possible, so very dumb.

Jason Clarke is strong as the weak senator, and he wisely goes easy on replicating the unmistakable Massachusetts accent.

The whole picture is lifeless and without consequence.

While witnessing the physical act of love on screen can sometimes transcend into something with great depth, this is, sorry to say, not one of those cases. It’s just a lot of huffing and puffing.

It is a shaggy dog road movie, and a drug-hazy one at that, but beneath the silliness and character-based gags, Crystal Fairy is, I feel, an unusually insightful look at self-imposed false identities and group dynamics.

There are plenty of great moments, but they jump out amid a jumble of strangely flat scenes. This doesn’t feel like the work of a great master; it’s a discordant brew that just doesn’t blend right.

Somehow, The Final Reckoning is 170 minutes, but, like Tom Cruise running across Westminster Bridge, it zooms. Even the acres of baffling dialogue are delivered swiftly.

Howe’s film is drenched in empathy, where violent actions aren’t exactly excused, but at least framed with understanding.

Borgman‘s crafty, trickster-ish screenplay, always two steps ahead of you, keeps you rooting for clues, enough to put your ethics on temporary hold.

Seth Rogen’s naughty food cartoon Sausage Party is, like much of his best work, deceptive packaging.

Not many side-splitting jokes, but a goofy glee is smeared across it all.

This extremely homemade film, written and directed by Bridey Elliott and starring her own mostly-famous family, is extremely funny at times and nerve-wracking at others, but also pitch black to the point that many will find it unbearable. I say stick with it; if nothing else, the film is a work of great daring.

It’s a play shoehorned into a film. Sometimes that can work – LaBute’s managed it before – but it’s a steep hill to climb, and this one doesn’t quite make it.

Gitai has chosen stylistic cinema over propaganda, and he is a director who regularly gets bogged down a bit in form.

The prolific 76-year-old British creator of character-rich, social dramas steeped in natural realism (usually) has whiffed it and whiffed it hard with this one. It’s not that it’s just “lesser Loach.” It is, in my opinion at least, humiliating.

All the pieces are in place for a gripping indie horror flick, but this pointless, motivation-free film just goes around in circles.

The movie itself is a retread of indie story beats we’ve all seen time and again. Slate’s tornado of a central character doesn’t quite overcome the rote aspects of this production.

It isn’t just the bright colors and the costumes but every visual aspect of Byzantium that sings. Neil Jordan knows where to put the camera. It’s just a shame he wasn’t able to inject a little life inside that frame.

There are scenes that snap together nicely with some sharp and nuanced observations. But the film is saddled with uninteresting surface-level characters. There’s a phoniness exuding from the entire project, made all the more discouraging since the plot-light, shaggy dog story is trying to feel so real.

This is detached, flat film-making at its most bare. You figure out which lines of dialogue deserve to be underlined.

Life After Beth, a frustrating affair due to its waste of resources, feels rushed and under-rehearsed. It is a style of film-making that hopes it can glide its way into your good graces on ad-hoc performance flourishes, a wall-to-wall audio mix and editing patches. One soon recognizes this all a cover for one key issue: a lack of original ideas.

It’s the same low-budget horror flick you’ve seen many times before, but it’s nice to see some local variants on a familiar theme.

There’s really not much going on with Roar storywise. But then you take a step back and think about what it is that you’re watching. My viewing of Roar was set to a soundtrack of “Oh my God!” and “Holy crap!”, all of my own making.

It transcends the usual biopic limitations to tell a specific story about some well-known people with larger, universal implications.

What’s key is that even though this is a movie about a scoundrel, it’s all very optimistic. Forbes and Wolodarsky keep the frame bright and the filmmaking calls attention to itself only when necessary.