Marshall Shaffer

The film plays right into Tim Robinson’s sweet spot of surrealistic and satirical comedy.

Laura Casabé abstracts the typical emotions of tortured teens, only to then amplify them.

Drowning Dry offers something akin to a cinematic concussion as it begins warping the experience of time.

Hardly a false note is sounded throughout The Friend, but it operates within such a limited emotional range that it drifts into monotonic plainsong.

The rhythms and structure of Holy Cow embody the swirling confusion and contradictions of adolescence itself.

An empowering narrative of one woman who refuses to see age as a ceiling, the film serves as a potent warning for viewers about the marginalization of the elderly.

This hybridized essay film embodies the complications and contradictions inherent within Black history—complete with all its erasures and variances.

This lacks the zest and dynamism of Jude’s more subversive output, though even a minor work from a major filmmaker still manages to thrill and tantalize.

Emilie Blichfeldt knows the exact point of queasiness to which she can push an audience and gradually tests how much further she can move that mark with each successive scene.

The artist and audience member are coequal—and codependent—in this perceptive drama about a parasocial relationship that enters the realm of reality.

Right out of the gate, the filmmakers’ filtering of a James Bond-esque espionage tale through a grindhouse sensibility exists in such a state of emphatic stimulation that each shot feels punctuated with an exclamation point.

Blue Moon, like Lorenz Hart in his day, trusts that audiences want to engage with subjects that matter through deliberate dialogue.

Trying to clarify the fog of war is a patently paradoxical task, Gates successfully argues – and she can prove the assertion within the grand satirical framework of the script or in a wry comic detail derived from the immediacy of a scene.

A good film captures merely a life. A great film like Train Dreams encompasses an entire way of life. Bentley’s modest, moving epic of the common man is a thing of rare beauty.

It’s the rare film that can hit a nerve as well as an artery.

Condon’s conducting of the whole affair is technically competent … dazzling, even, in sections. But all that flashiness is not blinding enough to conceal the gap between the tune it sings and the routine it dances. That is to say: Kiss of the Spider Woman may be about movie magic, but the film itself isn’t always magic.

Everyone involved might not get the exact arrangement they imagined, but the outcome is still magical in its own way.

While this send-up might not pass the scrutiny for a rewatch or cult classic, it’s at least good for one fun and unexpected go-round.

It’s still a hilarious adventure, but Ulman loses some of her magic within a more diffuse narrative framework.

The film has no answers because Lin plays it more like a heist film—where the bounty is the purity of the unexposed North Sentinelese—than a sincere human drama about faith and identity. Lin entertains as a result but struggles to enlighten.

The humor lands as if it’s coming not from the writers but through the characters by its grounding in the details of their lives.

If there’s any sense of motion in the film, which is largely defined by its patient camerawork and editing, it’s in Dusty’s gradual recognition of and response to the emotions that accompany his corporal yearning to remain in place.

A simplicity of spirit guides writer-director Isaiah Saxon’s fable-like feature debut.

In Webley’s empathetic rendering of a family’s dire dilemma, no one is absolved or blamed – yet everyone pays.

The Return may render its mythological figures lifelike through flesh and blood, but nowhere inside that viscera lies a beating heart.

It’s unclear if Steffen & Flip believe in a hell for their characters. But their 85-minute torture device disguised as a movie proves they believe in one for their viewers. Not even cheese ‘n’ rice can save this dismal enterprise from doom.

April’s frames seek to embody a dizzying span of human experience, even if Dea Kulumbegashvili occasionally strains to corral it.

Sora Neo struggles to balance the immediacy of adolescent angst with the long-range outlook of using the students’ experience as a canary in the coal mine for society at large.