Jordan Raup

While not fully engaging on a narrative level, the project at least demonstrates Kogonada hasn’t lost his filmmaking mojo, crafting a movie that may seem more personal to him than most viewers.

It’s the director’s most emotionally attuned and narrowly focused work, a film in which our attention is not pulled along by heavy dramatic shifts or distracted by a mountain of subplots, but rather how trauma can form a life of complacency and it’s only slivers of progress that hint at a more promising future.

While there’s an infectious energy to the process of musical creation and an impressive lead performance from newcomer Danielle MacDonald, the feature debut of Geremy Jasper is ultimately hindered by predictable story beats and a cynical outlook at the world it’s capturing.

John Callahan’s life is a fascinatingly complex one, and Phoenix is certainly the ideal actor to portray him, but Gus Van Sant’s maudlin, erratic approach leaves too little of an impression.

For fans of the series, The Trip to Spain gives one a wholehearted meal of all they could possibly desire.

With Wiener-Dog, Solondz is perhaps at his most evidently candid, showing all the different, damaged people that can enter and exit one’s life, and what our mutually shared, inevitable destination will be.

It’s difficult to imagine something funnier, dumber and more action-packed coming from this group.

Has a compelling hook ... but the follow-through leaves something to be desired.

The rigorous perspective solely on these mythical creatures is a daring decision––a more compelling experiment than the overdramatized recent entries into the Planet of the Apes franchise––but the end result is more commendable than dramatically captivating.

While Burns is certainly damning of the forces that let these tactics be utilized, the message of the film is ultimately more about coming clean as a nation for one’s mistakes and the oversight needed between branches to have a government of integrity.

Landline is a film about many things: sisterhood, infidelity, growing up, marriage, parenting, self-discovery, etc. That it manages to have illuminating insights about each, and none feeling like they are taking the backseat, is a feat unto itself.

The Sky Is Everywhere is certainly a delight to behold; one just wishes Nelson mined a bit deeper in the adaptation process, pulling back on trite verbosity and letting Decker’s fanciful, psychologically striking vision do the talking.

For an 11-year-old sneaking into the theater for his first R-rated movie, Deadpool could prove to be a revelatory trip. For myself, it was an exhausting, grating experience, lacking in wit and cleverness as it crumbles underneath its wall-to-wall torrent of jokes. If this represents a new stage for comic-book adaptations, the future is even more dismal than one could have imagined.

While Donzelli’s latest feature is a well-acted, stifling study of domestic violence, one wishes there was more to take away than a schematic lesson in the horrors of abuse.

A ruthlessly nihilistic beast of a movie, Elijah Bynum’s second feature Magazine Dreams provides a one-note powerhouse acting showcase for Majors, who ends up getting lost in the drawn-out second half as thematic points that initially sting get repeated ad nauseam and red herrings meant to shock become unnecessary side plots.

Throughout Photograph, Batra shows a sensitive touch and a patient eye for the subtle rhythms of human connection

Goat is a compelling watch, but in the end, its themes are a bit muddled, and certainly not unique.

While Adam seems almost like a rite of passage before we get more complex trans dramas in mainstream filmmaking, one can’t help but feel frustrated by its missed opportunities.

Swiss Army Man is an exceptionally unusual, one-of-a-kind achievement, worthy to seek out for that factor alone. However, if as much time was spent on refining the script as was the world-building, this could have been a magical realism fever dream like few others.

As the fun hits a brick wall, the film doesn’t quite have the pathos of other coming-of-age stories like The Edge of Seventeen, more focused on selling the amiable, Superbad-esque hang out vibe that is so attuned to Davidson’s brand of comedy, but when it is time for some comeuppance, it’s easy to feel for both Mo and Zeke.

Jeff Zimbalist and Maria Bukhonina’s new documentary attempts to elucidate the thought process behind these daredevil theatrics. Yet it ends up doing more to glorify and celebrate their life-threatening, thrill-seeking actions than interrogate the complexity of why they have devoted their existence to an insane diversion that has seen many of their friends fall to their deaths.

Despite a committed lead performance and flashes of finding beauty in the bizarre, Buster’s Mal Heart loses confidence as it proceeds, resulting in a journey of half-formed ideas that could’ve used as much focus as Malek’s dead-eyed glance.

There are few films that make one rethink the entire genre that came before it, but with their continually surprising, feminist bent approach, the Zellners have succeeded in doing so.

Mortensen is clearly attuned to the emotional toll of maintaining such a relationship—loving someone even if they don’t show any love back—but once this idea is firmly laid out early on, the repetitive narrative doesn’t expand to reveal more layers of complexity.

Joshy doesn’t provide any new revelations about the transition into adulthood, but, with an amusing ensemble, you could be stuck with a much worse group of guys.

Babylon is a brash, bombastic, unwieldy comic opera conveyed with enough bad taste and directorial panache that it—refreshingly—registers as a refutation of the well-mannered prestige drama to which these kinds of nostalgic odes often conform. And while there’s a touch of wistfulness in regards to the communal power of big-screen cinema, the film is more defined by an acidic unsentimentality, both when it comes to its characters and the precarious world they inhabit.

Finding new ways to draw humor out of the MeToo movement and carnal objectification, this is a limber, gratifying sex comedy that has more on its mind than successful innuendos and punchlines.

The entire saga of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is compelling in showing the burden that journey can take, even if the end results don’t make for Gilliam’s finest hour (or two).