Mark Hanson

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Visitor ultimately posits a vision of transcendence through anarchy, seeing repression as the enemy of social progress.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

The film is nothing but a chintzy promotional tool for Celine Dion.

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

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

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.

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

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

Randall Emmett’s directorial debut is virtually indistinguishable from the scores of cheap VOD action thrillers that he’s produced to date.

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.

The film resembles less a realistic peek into the modern slavery of immigrants in America as it does grist for the torture porn mill.