Pat Brown

A deeply unnerving film about the indissoluble, somehow archaic bond between self and family—one more psychologically robust than Aster’s similarly themed Hereditary. And it’s also very funny.

The film is an imperfect but affecting portrait of social isolation that captures both the pain and the warmth that comes with finally letting others in.

Margarethe von Trotta's documentary reminds us of the reasons for Bergman's continued influence on cinema today.

This lively adaptation plays up the novel’s more farcical elements, granting it a snappy, rhythmic pace.

Despite convincing performances, the film is hampered by its stylistic and moral conventionality.

By turns wry and tragic, but never glib or mawkish, this is a visually rich and evocative drama about navigating the often treacherous path to adulthood.

When the devastating quake finally strikes, it creates a truly suspenseful scenario of vertiginous falls and last-minute saves.

The film falls back on the myth of modernity being born in the laps of practical, native-born American ingenuity.

Andrei Konchalovsky’s film is fascinated with the creation of great art in the midst of socio-political turmoil.

Matthew Barney re-instills nature with some of the mystic aura that modernity, with its technologies and techniques of knowledge, has robbed it of.

As a musical, Dexter Fletcher’s film is just fun enough to (mostly) distract us from its superficiality.

Even though it’s about a person who speaks with courage about the urgency of the global crisis, I Am Greta itself doesn’t possess enough of that urgency.

That Maite Alberdi’s camera itself is present in The Mole Agent as a quasi-ethical concern suits the way Sergio, as he shuffles through the home’s hallways, gradually comes to be uncomfortable with his own surveillance.

From beneath defensive layers of distanced comic despair emerges a sincere story about a young woman’s emotional reconciliation with her troubled place of origin.

The film translates the often difficult realities of a specific kind of marginalized love into a story with broad appeal.

The film is an unnervingly beautiful tribute to the lives lost during the Holodomor, and to the people who have seen the world for what it is, instead of the dream of it they’re instructed to believe.

Its characters are suffused with a paradoxical kind of fear that can only happen in a dream, the dread before an immense catastrophe that’s unavoidable because it’s already happened.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film prioritizes the sentimental over the true, the tidy moral over the messy reality.

Maïmouna Doucouré has a remarkable grasp of the irrationality and volatility of middle-school social dynamics.

This tongue-in-cheek gorefest gives the impression of an only semi-coherent joke on the audience.

The musical format proves a natural fit for Leos Carax’s love of the visual fantasies created by the cinema’s most basic means of illusion.

It seems so invested in a rehabilitation of Brittany Kaiser’s image that the filmmakers’ own motives end up being its most interesting subject.

As it proceeds toward its telegraphed rom-com ending, the film becomes just more empty rhetoric, an ineffectual reiteration.

Freaky doesn’t reach for any arch commentary beyond the suggestion that, hey, Freaky Friday the 13th is a pretty funny idea.

What we’re confronted with in the film may be less the quaint idiocy of four dull simians and more our own inability to loosen up and just live.

Bumblebee exudes some of the tediousness of a reformed sinner who decries hedonism, trying hard to convince us that it now believes in something.

Avoiding excessively heightened melodrama, Thirteen Lives doesn’t substitute it with much that one couldn’t already find in the copious amount of available coverage of the real-life incident.

An epic adventure in the guise of an arthouse flick, The Survival of Kindness makes up in visual power and moral clarity what it lacks in subtext.

For all of the film’s somberness, its depiction of an era of rigid class divisions and incalculable loss still comes through the hazy, soft-focus goggles of nostalgia.

Derek Jarman’s 1990 film isn’t without hope that we can regrow a paradise.

In the end, Fernando León de Aranoa’s film suggests that there may not be a lot of daylight between a good boss and a true villain.

Magazine Dreams melds the alluring and the horrific in an unsettling mixture suited to its account of the peril of pursuing physical perfection.

With great clarity, the film conveys how discipline can be directed both inward and outward.

Paul W.S. Anderson has simply combined the established iconography of the popular Capcom game franchise with prefab movie moments.

Touch Me Not‘s commingling of narrator and narrative, character and actor, fiction and documentary suggests that cinema itself is capable of being a manner of touch, the site of a nebulous and freeing encounter between people.

In pushing so many seemingly crucial moments off screen, the film transforms its main characters into blank slates.

Woke Disney, trying to navigate a tricky representational path, steps all over itself throughout.

A heady rush of ideas, the film’s avant-garde mélange of live-action footage, abstract video art, and multiple kinds of animation just barely masks that it’s a rather simple story about a Zoomer’s inner struggle with both her own mortality and that of the world.

In the end, there's little payoff for all the repetitive series of evocative visions and mute stares.

Director and co-writer Hannah Fidell's film never finds the right mix of meaningful parable and sophomoric romp.

The film’s approach is completely subsumed by the importance of the Mayor Pete persona as the means and ends of the candidacy.

The film feels rather like listening to the arsonist calmly explain why he set the fire as we continue to watch it rage.

The film never feels as satisfying or as haunting as its bow-tying epilogue strives for.

The dichotomy represented by Jonathan and John is too clean for the film's exploration of a divided psyche to ever feel particularly complex.

One may wish that the absurdity of the conceit had been matched by a bit more irreverence in the script and audacity in the imagery.

While the film features a strong performance from Judy Greer, it’s essentially a patchwork of broad strokes that rarely feel like they’re bringing its world to credible life.

The film’s overtly non-specific title is surely meant to suggest some kind of pared-down elementality, but, in the end, it mostly just reflects the story’s lack of definable character.

There’s a surprising sense of communal exchange between the male strippers and their fans in Gene Graham’s documentary.

Its performatively extreme imagery thinly masks a rather banal view of male subjectivity and inner conflict.

Ralph Fiennes’s film too conspicuously avoids an overt political perspective.

The second half’s series of hollow visual spectacles foreground the film as a corporate product.

The film doesn’t bring to light otherwise unexplored aspects of the experience or memory of persecution and genocide.

Despite glimpses of a larger critique of the American project in Afghanistan, it lets us escape from the horrors of war before it finishes demolishing the illusion of a clean one.

It’s at a certain point toward the finale that this Scream becomes almost as drearily repetitious as the reboot culture that it skewers.

Gene Stupnitsky’s Good Boys is Big Mouth for those who prefer ribald humor about tweenage sexuality in live action, though it lacks the Netflix show’s frankness and authenticity.

Transforming Ophelia’s abuser into a helpful co-conspirator hardly seems like the most daring feminist reading of Hamlet.

Like a traumatized psyche, it remains uncomfortably stuck in the past, replaying familiar events in an effort to empty them of terror.

Around his main character, writer-director César Díaz builds a complex but unpretentious interrogation of national belonging.

The film’s outward liveliness can’t mask the inner inertia it has as just another lifeless product assembled in a factory.

While it can be expected that high-concept horror movies will often be sewn together from the premises of recent genre successes, it’s much too easy to see the stitches in writer-director Jacob Chase’s Come Play.

After a while, the film’s not-strictly-linear structure and handheld camerawork come to feel like self-conscious signs of “gritty” realism, attempts at masking a certain conventionality.

Throughout, the film can’t decide what attitude to strike toward its characters’ evident greed.

The film’s evocative imagery doesn’t compensate for the story being told with such a heavy hand that it dulls, rather than sharpens, Justin Chon’s urgent political message.

Convenient plot twists undermine its early pretense that it’s aiming for something other than to exploit our deepest, most regressive fears.

Michael Winterbottom’s film succeeds in translating the problematics of intercultural conflict into thriller fodder.

Claudio Giovannesi’s film is more an interesting tweak of Goodfellas than an eye-opening social statement.

It’s the way the film’s humor specifically subverts its genre’s expected emotional valences that makes it so effective.

The film’s relatively static approach to narrative works in scenes where the material is funny or elevated by a certain performance.

Its major contribution, as one museum curator suggests, may be to bring the works of Moshe Rynecki back into prominence.

Spaceman seems to want to be an allegory about men’s emotional unavailability and its impact on heterosexual relationships, but instead of coming across universal, the film’s human characters, along with much of the drama, are mostly empty space.

Often divertingly colorful and busy to a fault, the film seems to dare us to mock the world of comics' most risible superhero.

There’s something very cheap at the core of this overtly, ostentatiously expensive film, reliant as it is on our memory of the original to accentuate every significant moment.

It’s difficult to shake that the film finishes saying what it has to say long before it staggers to the end.

The film could be taken as an intentional travesty of the superhero genre, if only it weren’t so tortuously tedious.

Throughout, the filmmakers occlude the most fascinating and potentially powerful elements of Jean Seberg’s history.

The film might have better performed if it consisted of more than a smattering of good but relatively isolated ideas.

The film's command of action defuses concerns about whether it offers a thorough social critique.

As it proceeds through a series of teary reconciliations in the last half-hour of its 110-minute run time, the film's didactic drama begins to grate, its treacly emotions feeling increasingly unearned.

The film draws us through its play toward darker, too-seldom-considered sides of human and doggy nature.

The film is at least as likely to elicit laughs as shrieks, and certainly unlikely to leave a lasting impression.

The fatal flaw of the film is that it genuinely believes in the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie.

Flag Day is little more than a near-two-hour montage of tear-streaked faces shouting blandly melodramatic lines at each other.

At the very least, Ryan Reynolds’s casting perfectly splits the difference between the adorable and the absurd.

The film misplaces the root of our current existential dilemma, then covers it with tepid droll comedy and clunky melodrama.

Ciro Guerra never quite finds an imagistic equivalent to the novel’s apocalyptic mood and subtly hallucinogenic atmosphere.

Promising but failing to deliver the colorful characters and winding, breakneck plot of a caper, Operation Fortune may itself be a ruse, but it’s not a convincing one.

At its best, the film doesn’t just privilege altered states of consciousness, it is an altered state of consciousness.

Clarke works hard to make the messy, perpetually flustered Kate relatable, but the film surrounds the character with a community as kitschy and false as the trinkets she sells in Santa’s shop.

The film goes from biting satire to broad farce and back as Alain Guiraudie fills it with both social observation and ludicrous incident.

Matthias Schweighöfer’s film puts itself in a box, consistently failing to justify why its story deserves our attention more than the spectacle of the recently deceased rising to feast upon the flesh of the living.

The film has a rather perfunctory feel, as if it were unwilling to go all in on its ludicrous concept.

After a brilliantly constructed opening, Dario Argento’s film gives the impression only of a giallo doodle.

The repetitious plot is more ritual than text as we watch yet another Liam Neeson avenger defy the will of younger, unscrupulous men.

Perhaps the fairest description of Stallone’s performance is that it’s only as one-note as the material, his stern tough-guy muttering and grimacing just about right for a screenplay that feels like it’s been plucked out of a dustbin left untouched since 1995.

There’s a self-reflexivity to the game’s artifact-y textures that’s lost in this film adaptation, where the finely detailed look of just about everything says nothing in itself about the endless possibilities of a digital world’s malleability.

Given its hero’s imperviousness, the film’s chaotically edited action sequences tend to be devoid of suspense.

In transforming folk metaphors into utilitarian attributes of an action hero, Disney exposes the emptiness of their product.

Director Ty Roberts’s film is unable to realize that its subject matter is that of a horror story.