Pat Brown

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.