Sarah Kurchak

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.

As a parade of exaggerated neon-soaked atrocities, Climax is certainly never boring, but it often strains credulity where it aims to provoke genuine discomfort. It exhausts where it should provoke.

Just Mercy is incredibly effective at what it sets out to do: change hearts and minds about capital punishment, bring more awareness to the brutality of killing other human beings in the name of the law, and highlight the racism and other issues of structural inequality that lead to the high margin of error in death penalty convictions.

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.

I might not be able to tell you what exactly Assassination Nation is, but the one thing I can confidently say is that it’s not easy to forget or dismiss.

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

Angela Robinson, who wrote and directed the film, has managed to take what could have been a tawdry or salacious look into Wonder Woman’s naughty roots and give her real-life characters – and their genuine love for each other – the same amount of respect that any vanilla, monogamous heterosexual historical figure would receive.

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

While the quality of the film’s craft is up for little debate, though, it’s overall appeal and impact are far more polarizing.

Posthumous still manages to charm more often than it disappoints.

With its wacky space shit, off-kilter gore, creepy atmospherics, and hammy breakdown, most of which happen all at the same time, Colour Out of Space is, inarguably, one hell of a trip. It’s just not a trip that everyone is going to enjoy taking.

Fans of [Herzog's] unique style and humor will find much to enjoy in Salt and Fire, even if the film does lack some proper cohesion. Anyone who’s wavering in their critical affections, however, can easily use this as an example of what happens when a good artist buys into their own hype and mythology.

Halloween deserves credit for its efforts to balance old and new, for taking us back to Haddonfield in a way that isn’t purely for cheap nostalgia, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that there’s something more that it could have been achieved.

Payne’s heart might have been in the right place with this one, but the execution feels flippant at best.

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

Regardless of its seemingly admirable intent and ambition, The Laundromat is not a good film. It’s sloppy, and self-indulgent, and in no way worthy of the self-satisfaction it brings to its big conclusion. It’s not without its amusing moments and solid performances, but it is, in the end, a thoroughly frustrating and tedious experience.

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.

Neither Todd Phillips’ hollow script nor his hey-check-this-shit-out direction offer much to work with, but Phoenix still manages to wring enough out of Fleck to make Joker almost work as a character study.

It’s a film in which provocations are punchlines and treading into potentially offensive territory is an end in and of itself. It consistently pushes every boundary it comes across, and then just sort of stands there and shrugs about it.

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.

It doesn’t work on a purely aesthetic level or as a political statement, and the combination of the two goes together about as well as a mid-level Coens comedy and a morality play about racism masquerading as a thesis.

The direction suffers because Aronofsky is so enthralled with the grotesque potential of the body at the heart of his film that he’s often unable to focus on anything else.