Mark Hanson

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.