Matt Cipolla

As a whodunnit it largely works, save one aspect easy to spot miles away. Stakes-wise it’s high, even if it pulls its punches once or twice on who bites the bullet. As a return to form for Scream, this is a sigh of relief––notwithstanding some key issues VI has a freewheeling sense of lunacy, and it’s way too fun to decry.

This one sure is a challenge. Lots of that has to do with how the movie’s successes only become apparent after the fact. Its structure is its story, and it folds in on itself as much as it stacks its pieces on top of one another

Karia hasn’t made a deep film or even a particularly unique one, but he’s made one that has enough to get by. It’s not just good—it’s good enough.

With Days, Tsai turns the audience into the lonely and makes them see the world from the inside out.

There’s often a lack of narrative purpose, and refreshingly so. It follows whatever catches its eye. It, much like Bourdain, is zealous in collecting the excess of surrounding information.

While von Horn’s script has trouble fitting its themes and plot together, Magdalena Koleśnik’s performance commands the good and the bad.

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair isn’t an exposé on internet culture or social media. Nothing about it is shocking, nor is it meant to be. That’s why it feels so real when it reaches its natural conclusion.

As a fully-fledged statement, El Planeta wavers about as much as it succeeds. As observational comedy with a bit of bite, it signals good things for Amalia Ulman as a filmmaker.

Dear Comrades! is—to throw an overused word around—timely, but largely in how it observes the conflict between communism and socialism and how modern audiences confuse the two.

If anything, Fireball works best as a personification of its own themes. The textbook feeds the truncated, the truncated the tactile. Its own interests and understandings don’t always seem to exist on the same plane, but perhaps that’s okay. They’re still shining. They’ll sort themselves out eventually.

It’s dissonant, often hypnotic filmmaking. It’s also rote for stretches, with Petzold’s narrative approach surprisingly straightforward enough to make it just decent overall.

Finding Yingying doesn’t plumb the differences between U.S. and Chinese relations as much as the story alludes to, but the sheer emotion of it all largely redeems it.

For a look at the life of John Belushi, it’s a fittingly brisk one. For a dive into his career, it’s one that, despite a general lack of originality, mines a few solid points.

Msangi pulls off something most filmmakers don’t: She adapts her own short film to a feature without stretching it out.

It’s about the many forms of privilege and the intersecting failures they result in. Most of all, it’s about how this United States, this oh so great country of God, can’t understand the difference between liberty and entitlement.

A collage of distant memories and the realities that threaten them, Residue is an auspicious calling card for its filmmaker.

Coup 53 isn’t the most coherent in approach or pacing, but its ambition––and overall literacy––ties its knots.

The Mole Agent may stumble through some of its choices at first, but it sticks the landing by finding a cogitative dissonance and refusing to solve it.

For such a wide swirl of contradictions, Epicentro largely pays off.

For a movie that follows a character’s perspective while remaining aware of his shortcomings, The Father marks a modest and involved debut from Zeller.