Michael Snydel

It eventually resorts to well-intentioned but inelegant info dumps to reach its climax, but the tactile environments and direct filmmaking separates it from most films of its ilk.

Scorsese and his production team have created an incredible document of one of the 20th century’s most complicated personalities, and one that feels close to being a great film.

Presented as multiple chapters that cloak a structure of two discrete halves, the problem is less the film’s fiendish compulsion to shock its audience with sudden body horror or its corkscrewing narrative than its design being seemingly reverse engineered to complete that purpose.

History has validated the view of these people as one of the major causes of modern ills, but Vice is so concerned with wallowing in the past that it has no idea how to say anything new.

Unfortunately, Pilon’s performance is by far the most engaging part of the film, a restless but ultimately familiar crossbreeding of coming-out experience, after school special, and sports achievement story.

In nearly everything other than its visuals, Early Man feels as ancient as its time period, a forgotten relic hibernating in development until its belated release. But coming from a studio and director who’ve repeatedly found new ways to reinvent the wheel, it’s extra disappointing to see them release something so primitive.

There’s a great documentary in Quest, but this is a case of a film that’s trying to cover too many things, and thus only muddles its own intentions.

This is less an examination of a singular person than a look at the torturous and sublime experience of his creative process as it relates to the most important people in his life.

Kill Me Please is remarkably accomplished for a debut feature despite feeling a little bit muddled in terms of rhythms and especially its ending, which tips its hat a little bit too hard to art-horror ponderousness. Still, it’s a vibrant debut that demonstrates that Silveira has a strong talent for depicting adolescence and its attendant horrors.

It insists on being on the right side of history, but is so concerned with portraying the extent of the violence that it forgets about victims in the process.

James’ depiction of the trial is methodical, juxtaposing testimonies from the Sung family, employees, jurors, and lawyers – including Vance. But the film is foremost empathetic to the experiences of the Sung family.

Fences is a reasonably strong adaptation and further evidence that Washington has an assured hand with both actors and the camera, but it feels stuck between its reverence to the source material and its desire for a more distinctive vision.

Peck has made one of this year’s finest documentaries. At once pulsing with anger and yearning for compassion, it’s an examination of past and present America as a cycle where the backdrop has changed and particulars have remained the same.

It finds a poetically understated ending, but the drama, especially near the end, borders on being too repetitive. Still, it’s a worthwhile showcase for excellent performances, assured direction, and a twist on the sports story that prioritizes character before history.

By the end, there’s a strange sense that the film has been both elongated and rushed in the way that it ends a few arcs, but it’s also an unusually sensitive romance that doubles as a showcase of three of our most talented modern comedic actors.

Tipping is a fresh voice who has already established a great sense of atmosphere, and more importantly, he’s shown that he can tell stories about a more stereotypically black experience with nuance.

Fatima inevitably falls into a catch-22: every time it presents an insightful new cultural situation, it starts to feel less like a film, and more like a series of richly detailed sketches.

Morgan struggles to make even a single fight between two people not look like it was edited with a shredder.

While the first half meditates on the inconsistency of intimacy and the ways that small things (e.g. close ex-girlfriends) grow to be daggers, the second half adopts a psychological severity that makes My King feel imbalanced.

Simultaneously pretentious, mind-numbingly tedious, and dizzyingly incoherent from scene to scene, Jason Bourne is the definition of diminishing returns.

It’s another well-made, culturally specific zombie film, but it could have been something much more filling.

Microbe and Gasoline reaffirms that Gondry has a talent for visually dynamic work about the losses of growing up. Like a faint childhood memory, the film feels formative, but inconsequential.

After an hour of slow burn simmer, Three culminates in a six-minute set piece that’s among the most memorable action scenes of the year.

It’s a film that’s feels nearly otherworldly in its isolation.

A stylish exercise in dread, teasing out its slow-drip horrors with precision, and building a deliriously evil presence that hovers along the fringes.

Jacquot’s Diary of a Chambermaid ultimately feels beholden to art-house dictates, especially with an ending that’s less confounding than poorly articulated.

In a Valley of Violence feigns to be a revisionist western, but it’s frustratingly stuck in a place of inevitability in the last half. It’s an excellently-made imitation, but coming from a director whose made a career of tilting the familiar, it’s a disappointing detour.

There’s an appealing sense of cyclical healing in watching these people go about their daily rituals; in the end, however, Pervert Park feels like an incomplete portrait of this tight-knit community.

Even as it pushes into the cozy familiarity of slow-motion party montage, Neighbors 2 can’t help but feel refreshingly new in its vision of the college movie as something unashamed, vibrant, and urgent.

This is the type of comedy where the flop sweat is nearly always present as each player tries to lift the comedy, only to tragically belly-flop over and over. No one here is phoning it in, but with material this bad, it would be hard to blame them.

Bi’s Kaili Blues is a bit too formless to hold together, even despite its immense merits and deep thematic resonance. Still: in one film, he’s already demonstrated himself to be an extraordinary visual stylist who’s not afraid to color outside the formalist lines.

Osmond knows how to present the citizens in a no-nonsense fashion that balances their day-to-day struggles and the parallel triumphs of their beloved horse.

Viktoria occasionally bites off more than it can handle, but even as it threatens to become unwieldy, it always feels essential.

The Next Cut is a love letter to Chicago, and a plea for a better city, but it’s a sermon when it should have been a conversation.

First Monday in May gathers together some of the most influential and radical contemporary figures in fashion, offers a comprehensive view into the creation of a groundbreaking fashion exhibition, and profiles one of the most exclusive figures in the world. And yet, somehow it all feels incredibly familiar.

There’s no doubt Hockney deserves appreciation for his artistic influence, but this documentary is less a reflection of his singular presence than the result of haphazardly mashing together a fascinating life.

Bispuri’s feature debut makes a powerful statement about the suffocation that can come with gender norms, and about the double-edged sword of gender performance.

There’s a potentially good story to be mined here, probably most likely with the mother, but every time it starts to find fertile emotional ground, it can’t help but become distracted and search for another surface.

Even if the film doesn’t quite rise to the zeniths of Farhadi’s considerable career, it’s another brutally insightful and relatable story about marriage, relationships, and the lives people sacrifice in order to save face.

Above all of the tiresome, poorly constructed mythology, nonexistent stakes, and presentation of subtext as text, Allegiant’s greatest sin is its total contempt for its viewers.

Linklater finds a joyful freedom in these men who refuse to discriminate. They’re happy to play dress-up daily, moving from discotheques to honky tonk bars to hardcore shows without worrying that they’re compromising some form of authenticity.

Giannoli’s ease with sugary, poisonous dialogue and the cumulating orbit of characters can’t quite mask the crowded plotting.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is a galling, casually offensive, and deeply unsatisfying film.

While the film becomes a constant test to outdo itself, the raw ambition isn’t nearly enough to make up for the content of the actual film: an ungainly, ugly, nearly interminable monstrosity.

Triple 9 isn’t trying to be something of grand social value. It wants to be pulp, and maybe it’s unfair to criticize it for issues of racism and sexism, but its clockwork, convoluted plot isn’t clever, and it’s certainly not very memorable.

While the story doesn’t always hold together, it remains moving.

Only Yesterday is unabashedly modest, but in its twin dialogues between the past and the present, and the undying lure of the country and the city, it’s a singularly specific story whose message echoes decades later.

Even at its most transparently manipulative, Risen doesn’t feel punishing. It’s universally good-natured without feeling too conniving.

Race is the rare biopic that needs more of its own main character.

The movie is more about how outsiders – whether consciously or unconsciously – exert control. The repercussions of colonialism hover over the text even as these characters have “noble” intentions.

As a study of grief, it’s moving, featuring authentic performances and a keen understanding of the receding hibernation that comes with losing a cornerstone person in one’s life. As a romance, it’s slow-going but believable. And as a look at the unfair mythos attributed to the dead, it’s nuanced and incisive. But in attempting to balance these complementary parts, Tumbledown is buried by its own ambitions.

There’s a very good love story here, but it needed to be about one relationship, not the nature of romance itself.

Just as the brothers themselves love to present dialectics about the duality of triviality and seriousness, so, too, does Hail, Caesar! constantly skate back and forth between feeling slight and monumental.

Strikingly shot and politically rich, Aferim! feels important, but too often it also feels like a fiery lecture inflected with moments of poetic grace.

The masterful ten-minute gallery set piece, for instance, is first positioned as a scene of meditation as she absentmindedly gazes around the room, looking back and forth between the paintings in the room and the people around her until Pino Donaggio’s serenely swirling score ebbs and flows with her own rising passions.