Sarah Kurchak

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.

As a writer and director, Hill demonstrates an endearing and encouraging empathy for his characters, crafting a portrait of adolescence that allows every emotion and every decision — from the most relatable at any age to the most boneheaded — to exist without irony, judgement, or condescension.

A United Kingdom hits all of the necessary emotional notes and political intrigue of a solid historical figure drama.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Between its structure, its worldview, and its anti-heroine, Destroyer is almost impossible to ignore. Love it or hate it, it will still leave an impression and it will undoubtedly inspire discussion.

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.

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.

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.

It might be a lesser addition to the Guest oeuvre, but it’s a welcome one nonetheless

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.