Marya E. Gates

It’s more like a reusable ribbon bow. It's not great. It's nothing special. But you can keep it year after year and place it on presents as long as you have scotch tap—or Lohan’s irrepressible charm—to hold it together.

While the filmmakers certainly have their heart in the right place, aside from maybe a plea for more compassionate medical professionals, nothing about Peaceful is very original or even entertaining.

In order to do this subject—and these women—justice, there is a need for a clear-eyed reckoning. Unfortunately, “Brainwashed” does not deliver that, instead favoring disingenuous rhetoric and often patently false information to serve its predetermined narrative.

Mildly diverting from time to time due to its beautiful production design, The School for Good and Evil is mostly an unmitigated slog, filled with underdeveloped characters, absolutely terrible dialogue, and a world that feels both completely ripped off from better things and unnecessarily complex.

The whole thing is mostly made up of tasteless decisions.

Wearing its influences on its sleeve, the rom-com aims to show where arranged marriage traditions and modern dating habits can fit in a multicultural modern Britain. Unfortunately, it can’t shake the screenwriter’s white gaze.

Destined to make audiences weep, The Swimmers is no doubt a crowd-pleaser with an important message about the growing refugee crisis worldwide, and Yusra’s story is one worth telling. It’s a pity the filmmakers couldn’t take the time to see her life as more than just a vessel for this message.

Unfortunately, aside from the always reliable Hawke and Okonedo, there isn’t much to praise about this deadpan dark comedy, which is miscalculated on almost every level.

Regardless of its minor flaws, Berger and his crew have crafted a faithful and heart-wrenching adaptation that fully realizes the novel’s trenchant anti-war themes.

Anchored by Kendrick’s best performance in years and Francis’ incisive script, Alice, Darling is a visceral, deeply felt clarion call, not just for more awareness of the signs of emotional, intimate partner violence but also as a reminder to those who have experienced this abuse to allow themselves some grace.

There is surely an audience for this kind of feel-good quote-un-quote feminism. But a book of such richness, with a heroine as complex as Birdy, deserves much more than this genial Renn Faire romp.

Sidney works more as an explainer for why Sidney Poitier remains such an important figure in American history—not just Hollywood history—than it does as a warts-and-all biography of Sidney the man.

Its perpetual commentary on the mainstreaming of queerness remains at odds with its very desire to tell its story within the Hollywood system.

That this catastrophe is director Wanuri Kahiu’s follow-up after her sublime debut “Rafiki” makes it all the more disappointing. Where that film has rich characterization, this has generalities. Where that film has vibrant cinematography, this has dreadful, bland compositions. Where that film has a detailed sense of place, this film has a disjointed, geographically murky portrait of L.A. and what appears to be a sponsored by SXSW and Whataburger view of Texas.

I was blown away by the film’s use of mostly archival news footage after its premiere at Sundance earlier this year. Upon a second watch I found it even more compelling the way Perkins, and editors Jinx Godfrey and Daniel Lapira, expertly deploy this footage to tell not a biography of ‘The People’s Princess,’ but rather of the way the media shaped the perception of her public life.

The nostalgia of Ponsoldt's film is curdled and rotten underneath its summery sheen.

The Blue Caftan deftly explores the complexities of interpersonal and romantic relationships. Halim, Mina, and Youssef share a love for each other and for their shared craft. They want to find happiness in this life without any regard for how society dictates they should. Touzani’s film is a rich, vibrant ode to love in all its many forms.

Eliciting powerful performances from her two leads and striking visuals from cinematographer João Atala, “Medusa” casts its gaze at the hypocritical and violent world of purity culture with unflinching honesty that will leave the audience spellbound long after the credits roll.

It’s in exploring the iconography of the hotel that the documentary shines the brightest. Van Elmbt and Duverdier are clearly well-versed in the works that were created on the grounds, or by former residents, and do their best to imbue their film with the same timeless cool that pulses through them.

With a script this sharp and performances this game, it’s a shame that the basic filmmaking doesn’t do anything visually to elevate the film further.

Incoherently directed, thematically muddled, and poorly acted, writer/director/producer/star Livia De Paolis’ drama The Lost Girls should have stayed on the page.

While it is great that the documentary gives their commitment to direct action proper respect, it sometimes downplays exactly how important the work of activists who got abortion legalized in states like New York, or who got Roe through the court system was. Where it does succeed well is in showing the socio-economic disparity in access to safe abortions, which cost roughly 5 times as much as a month of rent.

While it doesn’t quite live up to its grand ambitions, it’s refreshing to see a movie so beautifully and sleekly filmed attempt to wrestle with humanity’s deeper questions. Foxhole might not be in the top tier of the great anti-war film canon, but it's not too far away.

Ultimately Spin Me Round is like a bad vacation where even the gorgeous Italian seaside isn’t enough to make the time spent feel worth it.

By combining petty drama, deadpan humor, and the terror of human emotions, the filmmakers effortlessly straddle a liminal space between comedy and horror, never quite tipping their hand too far into either genre.

The blended tones and mixing of rom-com tropes with wry humor and mystery mostly work well until the film makes a hard pivot to biotech horror. By the last act the script begins to resemble "The X-Files," however the same implausibility that made that show a hoot, here unfortunately undermines the spell the film had successfully cast.

Filled with easter eggs for fans of any facet of Cage's career, the filmmakers don’t place a judgment on which of his films have the most value, understanding that a favorite film is intimate and personal, and that what matters is that it does resonate on some level.

Even with its rough edges, it’s refreshing to see something this big, this zany, and this open-hearted still has a place on the silver screen.