Mark Hanson

Concrete Valley reveals itself as a thrilling example, both in form and content, of the way that the fostering of community allows us to regain some measure of control over life’s adversities.

As dark as things get, the film never abandons its sly sense of humor.

The disconnect between the realities of different generations of gay men is one of Swan Song’s most unexpectedly joyful through lines.

More broadly appealing than Kleber Mendonça Filho’s past films, The Secret Agent is still unmistakeably the work of an artist who’s deeply fascinated with the ways in which cinema, politics, and personal history co-mingle.

Heretic intriguingly plays with our expectations of who the heroes and villains are in this scenario.

David Cronenberg stares upon humanity’s need to evolve toward some kind of survival with a serene, godlike assurance.

Few films feel as excitingly jacked in to our current social climate as Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

The film intimately immerses us in the psyche of a woman for whom each day is a minefield of uncomfortable interactions.

Ashley McKenzie’s film blossoms into a moving story about two people trapped by the institutions that they’re beholden to.

The film’s initial pull lies in the way that Sean Baker intoxicatingly keys his aesthetic to the fervor of a budding romance that we clearly know won’t end well.

Holy Spider trickily manages to bridge the gap between social realism and exploitation cinema in a way that hints at how both are rooted in a similar place of gritty authenticity.

The film is one of the more intrinsically frightening evocations of a traumatized mind since Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.

Taurus is in the business of self-aggrandizement, but this is a film that understands that stardom is inherently aggrandizing.

The film’s fanciful archival montages shrewdly demonstrate the ways in which memory and art seamlessly combine to document reality.

The film is astutely aware of the physical and psychological scars that that result from living in a state of tyranny.

Kristoffer Borgli’s film presents a perfectly absurdist setup that allows Nicolas Cage to flex his singular acting muscles in increasingly hilarious directions.

The film is winningly defined by its peculiar admixture of national pride and self-deprecation.

It may indeed be the perfect cinematic representation of our current media landscape, adapting to our collective brain rot from being terminally online instead of fighting against it.

Though often abstract in its imagery, the film’s blistering commentary remains firmly rooted in our present reality.

The film plunges us into a world that feels simultaneously naturalistic and otherworldly.

Pablo Larraín’s film readily conjures a paranoia-suffused atmosphere of fear for what might happen at any moment.

At its best, Anatomy of a Fall is nothing less than a rigorous modern treatise on the knotty interpersonal dynamics of long-term relationships and how conveniently they can be distorted when exposed to public scrutiny.

Throughout, Jane Schoenbrun reveals themself to be adroitly plugged into both the current technological and sociological landscape.

Weird accordingly (or is it accordion-gly?) takes everything to new heights of glorious ridiculousness.

The film is a vivid meditation on human possibility in the face of fate and nature’s tumultuous might, ending in a fog of ambiguity that mirrors that characters’ bewilderment.

While its plot is strictly by the numbers, Clean is elevated by its stylistic flair and propulsive pace.

Sweat mostly adheres to a time-honored tale of the pitfalls of fame, despite its ultra-modern context.

At its best, Alfonso Pineda Ulloa’s film gleefully embodies the grungy spirit of classic exploitation cinema.

While still intermittently thrilling as a basic retro-outfitted slasher, X ultimately comes off in a way that no porn (or horror) film should: like a tease.

Throughout, the film’s characters impressively hold their own when forced to defend their lives, with director John Hyams catching every incident of bone-crunching mayhem as if he were shooting a martial arts film.

Lee Daniels does such a good job investing us in the human drama of The Deliverance that it almost feels unnecessary when the supernatural elements inevitably take over in the final act.

Despite the film’s narrow scope, it’s hard to not be impressed by the political and civic engagement of its teen subjects.

While mostly pulling off this tricky balancing act of humor and real-life horror, the film doesn’t quite go far enough in its critiques.

Perhaps the script is deliberately harking back to a storytelling mode that was characteristic of Hollywood cinema for dramatic effect, but the musical aspect, while a neat gimmick, isn’t memorable or cohesive enough to make the homage, well, sing.

The Holdovers is ultimately a story about the absence of family, and as it watches three individuals come together and apart, it’s subtly attuned to the way that class constricts people’s lives.

Riley Stearns’s film consistently tickles the funny bone, even when it comes at the expense of psychological nuance.

It’s hard to deny that Michael Mohan’s preposterous fable doesn’t exert the dark pull of voyeurism itself.

The film allows the scion of one of Hollywood’s most notable families to interrogate her relationship with celebrity in self-aware fashion.

While the canvas of Robert Eggers latest is considerably broader than that of The Witch and the Lighthouse, it feels as if its psychological chaos hasn’t expanded accordingly.

Until its contrived conclusion, the film plays as a queasy satire of conditioned interpersonal behavior.

Kenneth Branagh's film understands the malleability of memory, and it embodies cinema’s ability to offer a kind of escapism, but up until its climax it plays like a retreat from reality.

The film reveals itself as a prototypical yet surprisingly tender love story between two damaged people re-learning how to move through a world that’s unable to adequately support them.

At its best, the film suggests some kind of hellish Nike commercial, where “just do it” becomes less an inspirational motto than a grueling portent of doom.

The film embodies the alienating angst of millennial life in all its nakedly neurotic glory.

Despite this clever setup, Tom Gormican’s film isn’t the self-reflexive skewering of Hollywood that one might expect.

While the film intermittently stuns in revealing Everest’s topographical mystique, its expedition into what makes climbers tick struggles to get off the ground.

Scott Mann’s film succeeds by simply committing to and steadily ratcheting up the ludicrous awesomeness of its premise.

The film is almost refreshing in its flightiness, even as it remains defiantly ignorant of the world in which it exists.

Whatever satire of white elite society is intended by The Forgiven has been blunted by monotony.

For a while, the work on the part of the performers is nuanced enough to distract us from the film’s implausibilities.

In the end, Edgar Wright isn’t particularly interested in taking aim at all that is dark in the zealotry that shapes a culture.

The real Jeffrey Manchester may in fact have been polite, but Derek Cianfrance’s film doesn’t convince you that it needed to be as well.

By the time the film comes to the end of its brisk runtime, it feels like nothing much has actually happened, despite all the narrative convolutions.

Dashcam is nothing if not consistent, as it’s every bit the empty provocation as the troll at its center.

Quentin Dupieux’s latest endlessly draws out every stilted interaction for maximum deadpan effect.

It’s disappointing to see a film with such a weird premise as Nightbitch ease into an orthodox storytelling mode.

Henry Selick’s flair for phantasmagorical sights is on full display, though Wendell & Wild’s excessively CGI-enhanced look is a far cry from the grounded tactility of much of his prior work.

Censor unfortunately pulls back from its social interrogation just when it’s working up a head of steam.

Some of the period action set pieces are spirited in their staging, while the film doesn’t lack for gruesome and elaborate kill sequences, which is almost enough to distract from the screenplay’s patchiness and insipid characterizations.

Johannes Roberts’s prequel ultimately remains buried by its indifference to unchecked corporate power.

Despite the retro vérité aesthetic that Benny Safdie employs to give Mark Kerr’s story a stylish new coat of paint, all that his version ultimately does is whip up a feeling of déjà vu.

Paul Greengrass employs a peripatetic restlessness to the material, and while that brings an often thrilling sense of verisimilitude to the film, the cliché-stuffed screenplay too often plays against the intended solemnity of the project.

The unoriginality of Presence’s story eventually calls out the POV conceit as a one-note gimmick, especially when the tension is dialed up in the film’s second half.

The film circles a thorny premise, which makes it all the more disappointing that it results in a conventional clinch.

As an exploration of the misogyny that drove Bundy’s crimes, Amber Sealey’s film mostly falls short of its potential.

If Infested had given us a little more reason to invest in its human specimens than in the blunt mechanics of its genre trappings, then maybe some of the commentary would have clung to us like the webs do to the spiders’ victims.

Regrettably, the one star of Anaconda that gets the shortest shrift is the most important one: the snake.

The film feels like a missed opportunity to interrogate society’s fervent need to make pariahs out of people for their past mistakes.

This film’s approach to slasher film mayhem is liable to induce some serious déjà vu.

Once you get past the faux-provocation of the film’s title, it’s difficult to tell what ideologies the filmmakers are trying to skewer.

The film’s status as a corporate entertainment product (among the film’s producers is the Winklevoss twins) also presents an internal discord in and of itself, particularly with the script incessantly preaching financial equality for all.

Timur Bekmambetov’s Screenlife film is more fluff piece than hard-hitting news story.

The film lacks for the methodically escalating stakes that makes the best examples of the genre so entertaining.

The film proceeds as a jumble of poorly sketched backstories and subplots, half-hearted topical references, and tepid fan service.

In Antlers, the big bad is never supposed to be as scary as society’s collective wrongdoing.

The primacy that it places on its dopamine drip of dread undercuts whatever genuine commitment it might have toward mental illness and trauma.

The film’s rote action-movie plotting is calibrated in a ponderously straight-faced way so as to give it some semblance of gravity.

In spite of the film’s strikingly lived-in sense of place, the script’s melodramatic storytelling works against that verisimilitude.

The shadow of Risky Business looms large, and distractingly, over Manuel Crosby and Darren Knapp’s film.

With The Whale, Darren Aronofsky brings a hollow sense of dignity to his schematic brand of cinematic misery porn.

Dune ends up feeling like an extended prologue for what one can only hope will be a sequel that will clarify its parables and paradoxes.

Throughout, Efron seems almost determined to wipe away the last vestiges of his youthful looks.

The Carpenter’s Son fails to even offer decent frights, unless one finds the preponderance of CGI snakes particularly scary.

Symptomatic of the Marvel-ization of modern action cinema, the film seems to exist mostly as an advertisement for future product.

The film is too blinded by manufactured sentimentality to see the more compelling what-if scenario lying right in front of its eyes.

Dangerous betrays the promise of its title by playing things extremely safe.

The film is a disastrous amalgamation of modern-day tech-savvy thrills and Clancy’s conservative expressions of patriotism.

In the end, Nicolas Cage can only do so much to bring this hastily assembled oater to life.

It’s easy to imagine the nihilistic avenues that Renny Harlin’s trilogy capper could have gone down.

If only everyone else had followed John Travolta’s lead, then the film might have lived up to its title.

William Brent Bell’s film proves that not every horror concept has the potential to be franchised.

As a peek into the relationship between sports, media and capitalism, National Champions feels like a beginner’s playbook.

Given that Mel Gibson makes little attempt to instill any sense of physicality to this dispiritingly paint-by-numbers affair, it becomes easy to understand the marketing of the film’s 4DX theatrical option as an act of overcompensation.

Mostly notable for its distracting resemblance to Rick Rosenthal’s Halloween II, Chapter 2 suggests for a while a needlessly extended epilogue to the first film.

Like any number of Exorcist wannabes, David Midell’s film is a special kind of hell.

Every story beat is unimaginatively cribbed from better films and every tepid exchange of dialogue is unconvincingly performed.

Any ambiguity over the veracity of the story’s events is quickly jettisoned to adhere to the demands of the leaden slasher-film plotting.

Fresh is pitched as a kind of genre corrective, except its tone-deaf cheekiness only results in a feeling of dreary regression.