Kyle Turner

Like Mike’s modus operandi as a criminal, the film goes through all the pro forma motions.

The film takes dozens of different anecdotes about cults and celebrities and manages to render them pedestrian, unoriginal, staid.

If the frames of Lou’s previous work suggested that reality was something that could be unlocked and unfurled, An Unfinished Film’s presentation of reality as it basically was unfortunately gives the filmmaker, and the audience, little to discover.

The film is startlingly earnest in its affection for Ke Huy Quan and making him play both to and against type.

If a musical is supposed to communicate things that can’t be conveyed through normal dialogue, Emilia Pérez’s biggest problem is that it falls prey to redundancy, regurgitating the same ideas about identity, desire, violence, and redemption, betraying how little it has to say in the first place.

Between Jackie, Spencer, and, now, Maria, Pablo Larraín has thrice committed the cardinal sin of taking a female icon of the 20th century and, in an attempt to hold a mirror up to her multitudes, flattened her into the equivalent of a kitschy postage stamp.

The film’s discernible brushstrokes serve as a reminder of the literal hands, the labor, it takes to raise someone, mold them into a survivor, and to carry love with you wherever you go.

This is a film of tremendous emotion, spirit, and paradoxically restraint and ambition.

Pulsating in the film’s veins is an eerie eroticism and a tactile awareness of the way the Church is controlling the bodies and minds of its women.

In spite of the too-muchness of their performances, the actors wrestle for expressiveness and subtlety against the script’s more obvious and schematic telegraphing of not-quite-nuclear discontent and, ultimately, reconciliation.

In the classic queer punk tradition of Bruce LaBruce, John Waters, and Gregg Araki, Ethan Coen’s film knows when to pay homage and when to move to its own rhythm.

Across the film, you can feel the push and pull between a master technician who built his career on the patient, delicate plucking at our heartstrings and his newfound desire to please a wide audience with the broadest of affective strokes.

This Thanksgiving is a slasher for today, slickly made, coolly mean, and with a satiric bite.

Horseplay is less an acutely mapped-out anthropological study into toxic masculinity and pervasive homophobia and misogyny, and more like having to spend a day chilling with the most annoying guys you know.

Flowing and keenly observant of its characters and setting, Punch swings above its weight class.

It’s not funny enough to have anything clever to say about its gag, and it’s not exciting enough to be a competent horror movie.

Though Carter is competent at making the chaos of a rainy match or the ecstasy of a clandestine tryst watchable, his characters feel like sketches with barely any idiosyncrasies. What’s the point of watching the game if you don’t care about the players?

That the screenwriter’s mother was changed by her empathy for people different than her is an admirable value to have. But the film takes a somewhat myopic approach to Black’s reach-across-the-aisle activism philosophy, focusing primarily on his work toward marriage equality.

Kalderon and the cinematographer Ofer Inov make Adonises out of the film’s athletes, but the film goes beyond mere marble-body ogling in its equal attention to the physical, psychological and emotional toll that training takes on Erez and Nevo.

It leads with a teen soap tone, and despite billing itself as a film, feels structurally more like a string of episodes smashed together.

Unlike its lead characters, Anything’s Possible never quite figures out if it wants to be distinctive or just another kid at school.

Heymann situates the notion of celebrity in the context of not just performance and gay culture but also familial intimacy, with striking detail.

The chemistry of its stars gives the movie a curious magnetism that is almost enough to forgive its flaws.

Ben and Sam’s blossoming romance does a lot of telling and little showing. While there’s the occasional amusingly idiosyncratic section of dialogue that sounds like a series of stagily poetic non-sequiturs, much of the couple’s bonding feels straightforward and unremarkable.

Harwood’s portrayal of Jamie is not as an already birthed star crashing down to earth, but a sweet, excited, restless 16 year old, testing the limits of his aspirations in a space that can’t possibly accommodate them.

Concerning itself with death and history, Swan Song asks for an assured hand, but gets an ambitious assistant’s—one whose scrutiny and interest in the assortment of ideas within the work dithers, but whose ideas are nonetheless present if left only simmering.

Bloom is an alluring actress, especially when playing more subtle dramatic beats. While she’s unable to elevate a rote script, Bloom, and her character, understand how to catch the gaze of an audience in a way that the camera does not.

Tucked like a pair of aces into a solid but unremarkable hand of poker is a story arc that not only heightens the dramatic tension, but also clarifies the film’s more compelling ideas, skillfully tying the stories of the documentary’s subjects to their political subtext.

A Gen Z crusade, hyper-aware of its Indiana Jonesian influences, is an entertaining conceit. But the plodding pace of Jude Weng’s film, along with its shabby dialogue, distracts from the more emotionally intricate subplot of the mother returning home to her father after her husband’s death.

Hudlin transforms a film that would be, in lesser hands, a formulaic hardship-as-aesthetic drama, into an earnest examination of what community means on the field, in the classroom and in our society.

With so much ground to cover, the scenes’ shortness can feel unsatisfying and even occasionally facile. Though conversations between parents and their children are designed to be emotional beats, there’s a peculiar staginess that comes off as jarring at times.

Much of the film feels not light and breezy, but like a self-conscious chore, unwilling to deviate from an established blueprint.

Freedia’s beguiling charisma carries the film, and it makes the case that her impressive power, in conjunction with collective action, could help carry a movement, too.

The HBO documentary Siempre, Luis wants to be about a political lion of a father, but it ends up more enamored with his charmed son.

Even through its absurdist, bleakly satirical lens, Bong understands that social inequity is not just theatre, but lived experience.

The sweetness of the film finds an amusing complement in its strange eroticism, itself part of the queerness of its genre mixing.

Effectively, the film feels dishonest and, in spite of surprisingly dynamic camera work, intellectually lazy. Ironically, there is enjoyment in watching Binoche and Hamzawi, whose character is rightfully unsympathetic to her schmuck of a cheating husband. Non-Fiction is at least no more clever than Unfriended: Dark Web.

Rather than being concerned with historical authenticity (Sandy Powell’s costumes are gorgeously anachronistic), Lanthimos gestures towards an emotional reality that posits the lover and the loved as soldiers, capable of being a casualty in what each party believes is a greater cause. What a blazing and burning feat of melodrama.

In its keen and sensitive and moving observations about the uncertainty in being Asian-American, it’s always drifting, and Wu’s incredible ability to convey all those ideas wordlessly is what makes the film more than just about a material China girl.

The difference between McQueen and the standard tortured genius documentary lies in the kind of artist McQueen was: Behind the (sometimes incendiary, sometimes infantile) provocations in his designs was a clear humanity, his garments the unfiltered expressions of his emotions and ideas.

The film confronts directly the contradictory feelings and impulses of a child who must assimilate into a new family, but Simón foregoes the bells and whistles of many other family melodramas, crafting instead an extraordinary and beautiful work of grief and memory.

The inventiveness of the deaths is limited, and the geography of the film’s setting limits what kind of world its characters can create. The film is as barren of uniqueness or anything else compelling as the actual landscape is of foliage.

Its subject matter is interesting, and it’s right to remind viewers of the need for different generations of queer people to communicate, but After Louie is burdened by narrative and dialogue clichés that undermine its emotional appeal.

There are a couple of impressive set pieces in Jigsaw, but the traps seem fairly rudimentary, and it’s up to the camera work to provide the needed jolts.

Mudbound’s is a large and cumbersome story not because of the complicated dynamics it presents, but because of the way they’re presented, with a lot of opportunity to explore the complexity between characters, but little of those opportunities are constructively used, perhaps because there is too much material on hand.

The Florida Project is spattered with profound sadness, with moments of externalized, violent frustration at presumed helplessness, at practically being born into all this. To what degree you believe Baker to be condescending or patronizing or exploitive is up to you, but the film’s bursts of light, its idea of what caregiving looks like when caregiving is a privilege, is handled with sensitivity.

Lady Bird is nothing short of tremendous, a wise film about how two people deal with ambivalence.

Winslet is doing an impression of Cate Blanchett doing an impression of Mia Farrow in September.