Sarah Kurchak

Free Fire might be a trifle of a quippy, feature-length shootout, but it’s the best damned trifle of a quippy, feature-length shootout you’ll ever see.

The superficial thrills of the genre are all present and adoringly rendered, but the actual purpose of the whole exercise is much harder to discern.

Once the giddy critical pile-on and hate-watching settles down, the (justified) moral outrage that (re)Assignment tries to thwart will end up being the regrettable and forgettable film’s only lasting legacy.

[A] truly remarkable film.

Lofty ideas of class, thwarted ambition, the superficiality of L.A. life, the nature of love, and the meaning of art are all explicitly addressed – and maybe discussed in a pretentious conversation or two – and then just as easily dropped, as if the simple act of naming themes is enough to establish their continued relevance in the film.

Given that The Salesman strives to be far more than a revenge thriller, Emad’s story isn’t enough to make it an unqualified triumph, but it’s still a genuinely good film, and worth watching.

Instead of simple heroes or avatars for big ideas about equality, Loving delivers complex, imperfect human beings who are struggling to find their place in a far from perfect world.

Posthumous still manages to charm more often than it disappoints.

On the whole, High-Rise hits more often than it misses. It’s a playfully demented and dry evisceration of the tenuous hold that modern western civilization has on civility, walking a fine line between the best genre horror and the loftiest of intellectual indie cinema.

The plot unravels beautifully, at a pace that’s methodical but still anxiety-inducing, building up an air of psychological fear so impenetrable that the only relief from it is an occasional splattering of visceral horror or an even more rare quip along the way.

The film starts to risk adrenaline fatigue after the first hour.

Much like the characters themselves, all of these off-kilter and seemingly disparate elements come together far better than they should and something just a little beautiful happens as a result.

It should be impossible to turn this kind of raw material into such an interminable slog, and yet somehow writer and director Marc Abraham...managed to do just that.

Kill Your Friends is effective and enjoyable in the way that dusty music compilations are.

It falls short of an instant classic. It’s not a mind blowing achievement in horror. But The Witch is a solidly good film.

Although it stumbles a bit at the end with a self-aware redemption that isn’t entirely earned or particularly in character, Diamond Tongues is still a brilliant and realistic portrait of the young artist as a bitter borderline failure.

It’s a very good op-ed in favor of America’s ability to live up to its potential and build itself into a country that actually represents the idea of liberty and equality that it’s espoused for so long. Thanks to the humor with which it’s presented, it’s also a pretty decent testament to the potential future of the country’s satire.

The execution of this story is almost uniformly perfect. Haigh’s script and direction are a clinic in careful and measured storytelling, favoring a delicate and devastating slow burn of a narrative over big dramatic moments and outbursts.

Leave it to writer, director, and professional expectation-defier Charlie Kaufman to make existential angst so completely delightful.

A Haneke who’s treading water is still a bizarrely entertaining filmmaker, but the fun is tinged with a hint of disappointment and a certain feeling of lost opportunity.

While Lean on Pete risks turning gratuitous in terms of narrative flourishes and excess, it’s never gratuitous in its characterizations. Each individual encounter is rendered with compassion and respect.

Thomas Andrews in Titanic and Spy Daddy Jack Bristow in Alias, sings so sweetly and wears his suspenders, goofy face paint, and guileless enthusiasm so well in the film that it’s easy to see both why he was plucked from the Canadian theatrical cast for the role. And why a bunch of similarly-minded hippies would want to follow him around an empty New York City and sing about love for a hundred minutes.