Justin Gerber

Holy Hell ropes us in with tales of delusion before chilling us with tales of terror.

The Birth of a Nation is one of the most confident writing and directorial debuts in recent memory.

Director James Gunn’s first foray into big-budget movie making succeeds despite focusing on characters largely unknown to mainstream audiences and provides some of the most genuinely affecting moments of any Marvel film to date.

Though it doesn’t end with quite the punctuation it deserves, The Eyes of My Mother is a beautiful nightmare from start to finish.

Goat deals with masculinity, fraternities, and PTSD in equal doses, covering all of them with brutal precision and most importantly, success.

There are a couple hiccups that prevent the movie from elevating to the classic status of your Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fictions.

Frenzied, kinetic filmmaking is hit or miss, but The Daniels are showcasing their talents as opposed to showing off.

A subplot and a longer-than-necessary runtime threaten to undercut Hall’s performance, but in the end the movie succeeds as a solid investigation into the day-to-day life of one suffering from depression.

What writer and director Kerem Sanga captures so well in First Girl I Loved is high school. What he captures even better is falling in love, or the naïve idea of what it means to be in love as a teenager.

The performances are so strong in Other People that they just about make up for the weak storytelling. Maybe “weak” isn’t the best definition for writer/director Chris Kelly’s debut feature film, but its structure definitely pales in comparison to all the effort given on screen.

Animal shelter/prison facility parallels become too heavy-handed, and performances packed with emotion give way to on-the-lam clichés.

Writer/director Josh Baena (Life After Beth) bookends Joshy with dark moments, and while the first works perfectly, the second threatens to unravel everything that comes before.

Director Matthew Vaughn’s latest film, Kingsman: The Secret Service, is an attempt at finding a balance somewhere between Austin Powers and James Bond that doesn’t quite succeed.

Bringing the action of future Dark Tower novels forward isn’t a sin. The sin is not having nearly enough space for it. The film is breathless in all the worst ways as a result.