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.