Sarah-Tai Black

While HIM’s visual and cinematographic landscapes might be stylistically evocative at times, they lack in narrative substance and a discerning formal logic, reducing images and themes rife with narrative potential into a series of hollowly aestheticized surfaces that squander the film’s own potential as well as the talent of its actors.

Honey Don’t! attempts another go at a mock, low-brow outing reimagined through a queer lens, but suffers irrevocably from an uncompelling mystery, patterned by a series of gags that leads nowhere.

Unfortunately, Opus isn’t able to keep up the tension of its cult-horror mystery, speeding through its reveals with a surprising laziness that feels counter to the care it initially took in building out its story.

Venom: The Last Dance remains steadfast in the franchise’s commitment to storytelling that, like a pot of water that never quite hits boiling point, is neither so-bad-it’s-good nor so bad it’s raucously entertaining, even if only unintentionally so.

As compared to both X and Pearl, West’s bag of cinema tricks in MaXXXine reaches a level of engagement that feels both compulsive and abridged.

While it’s not as much of a slow-burn of psychological torture as Bertino’s original, Chapter 1 sticks to the course and doesn’t let up on its lead characters once.

While its penultimate scene returns to its affections for shock and gore, there remains a feeling that it’s been apologetically tacked on to a final act that is, overall, lacking in any other sort of fun or thrilling narrative twists and turns.

While Ellis-Taylor is, as always, magnetic onscreen, Origin fails her talents, as well as both its characters and story, by reproducing the flaws of Wilkerson’s book with a stoic conviction.

With what is clearly Perrault’s first feature script, the stars here struggle to keep up their energy in what adds up to be 93 minutes of crude jokes.

While ideas concerning the awakening of the dead are rife with transformational potential, in The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster the means used to materialize them leave much to be desired.

While it is engaging to witness and hear of the ways that Hammons has continued to reject and undermine this market-minded approach to his work in the present day, the film’s focus on tracing Hammons’ work through capital, be it social or monetary, leaves the film with a bottom-heavy feeling of what can only be described as “ick.”

It is a constraint of cinematic vision that flattens the potential of the figures, the speech, and the movements of Women Talking. It is less about what is being said here – flawed yet fierce as it is – and more that, in order to realize the full impact of its meaning, what is being said needs to fight through the film’s own lacklustre veneer to be able to convey itself with any sense of spirit.

The film itself feels as if it has emerged fully formed from the mind of its author, for better and for worse. It is a study of women’s sexuality, desire and autonomy that succeeds just as much as it stumbles, a method of feminist storytelling that privileges the pursuit of desire over an evenness of narrative. It cares not for the customary, but instead for the messiness of real life, which here is inextricable from its own means.

While its issues with pacing can be overlooked in favor of its welcome sincerity and full heart, everything that Marks’ film offers us is well-trod territory.

The biggest disappointment of Williams’ film then is not the ordinariness of its style and narrative mechanisms or even its safe and easy politics in search of a similarly broad audience, but its unwillingness to disrupt, with full and heavy weight, the exact things that it critiques.

While Topside is without a doubt a film that lives within its own immediacy, it also feels somewhat entrenched within the hopeless inevitability of its own story.

While The Unmaking of a College stands as an important document of Hampshire history, it lacks the practical skills and vision needed to allure outside audiences.

That “Catch the Fair One” can’t imagine more for its characters, for the world it shapes, is its most glaring fault, and one that will likely leave many taking a deep breath as the credits roll.

While Robinson’s lecture is thought-provoking and his living tour of that same history is illuminating, the Kunstlers don’t add much in terms of directorial vision. Robinson is an apt orator and tour guide, but the literal translation of his lecture to screen lacks life and suffers from the inherent banality that comes with watching a recording of someone – no matter how charismatic – speaking to a live audience we are not part of.

If Morris and Aloni’s film is unfocused and weak in its patterning and construction, it is equally an important record of a living history that refuses to mythologize itself.

There is a specific tone to films scheduled for a holiday release – in short, they’re corny. And while that’s not always a bad thing, this year’s yuletide flick, A Journal for Jordan, feels particularly dated and often times emotionally cloying.

The research is there, certainly, but it is presented as if it were just that, without thought for the ways it could be presented in a more expressive form. There is a sense here that film is at most a communicative tool to simply transmit this information, rather than a way to enliven and reactivate new ways of thinking about this galvanizing figure’s past and the resonance of their work in our present. This is a shame. Murray deserves nothing less than a history in full color.

Unfortunately, Demonic often lacks the substance and energy needed to back up its narrative originality and hybrid genre form. While it is refreshing to see the groundedness with which the director approaches his newest project, his larger-than-life ideas still seem to have trouble finding their exact footing.

Spiral too often gets in its own way and reveals its internal machinations before they’re due.

One is given to wonder what it is exactly that the filmmaker himself lends to this film other than a completely ordinary commercial veneer.

The laughs are certainly there, but Andre’s almost trademark sense of intentional derangement is missing and in many ways, this is one of his strengths as a performer.