Sarah-Tai Black

While the original Now You See Me had a winking audacity that leaned into the absurdity of its bag of tricks, the newest installment feels rote and lacks the thrill of genuine surprise.

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.

Much like its predecessors, Bloodlines joyfully relishes in its Rube Goldbergian kills and thrills, often trading on the absurd humour of its own fashioning.

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.

Diop’s latest documentary film is a poetic witnessing of the contradictions, mediations and politics of cultural restitution.

It’s a shallow and soulless outing that has no faith in the intelligence of its audience, squanders the considerable skills of its lead actresses, and, in its shallow and inert politics, is pathologically audacious in the worst sense.

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.

While its celebration of all things fleshly, protrusive, and gloriously ectoplasmic may not be for those viewers too faint of heart, Fargeat’s no-holds-barred, wholly beyond your wildest expectations approach with The Substance will leave genre fans kicking their feet up in glee.

Where the horror of 2022′s Speak No Evil feels deeply, almost inescapably cruel in its final moments, Watkins’s film takes a relatively conventional approach, relying more on slasher tropes than producing a deep-seated sense of unease.

Fitzgerald gives a strong performance, especially considering the lack of depth her character is afforded, but her impact is drowned out by the film’s truly rancid attempt at upending the gendered inferences that Mollner has staged her character within.

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.

A tender comedy at heart, Thelma is a delightful romp that focuses on the different textures of the human experience and the poignant (and sometimes very silly) moments that come with it.

An energetic coming-of-age film that pairs the tonalities of a rugged sports flick with the depth of a well-scripted drama, Backspot is a promising debut from Waterson that will leave audiences cheering.

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.

As much as Occupied City’s observational eye is rooted in a humanistic and cumulative approach to history, it will, no doubt, leave those in search of a less austere approach wanting.

While unable to fully deliver on the promise of its artistic potential, The First Omen remains, nonetheless, a fun, low stakes introduction for horror newbies to The Omen franchise and an enjoyable enough tribute to the original film (offering, also, a more contemporary take on visualizing the grotesque).

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 its ramshackle editing could be unintentionally humorous, and the obvious dialogue almost veers toward the inadvertently enjoyable, it’s the movie’s insistence on punching down that renders it more of a nightmare than a fever dream.

Even if its cultural and artistic stakes remain relatively low in the grand scheme of things, The Blackening – whose enjoyment absolutely lies in the fact that it both knows exactly the confines it’s working within and doesn’t take itself too seriously – is still a hell of a good time.

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.”

A love letter to its characters and their real-life counterparts, the film is, above all, a witness to the kind of expansive love and kinship that is formed in the margins but nonetheless expansive in its imaginings of the world.

It is tempting to call A Thousand and One a love letter of sorts, but a more accurate read might be one of heartbreak. There is love here, certainly, but more than that there is frustration, anger and sadness at the way the world refuses to help those trying hardest to endure within it.

Soderbergh’s film tosses the many lessons of its predecessors, leaving us with a movie that is utterly devoid of its own magic.

It is a highly entertaining romp that doesn’t take itself too seriously and is unapologetic in both its self-awareness and sense of humour.

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 labour the filmmaker undertakes here is similarly personal and intimate; it is clearly an act of healing as well as an offering for others who see their lives echoed.

Rare archival footage is intertwined among the film’s historical narrative with an all-too-rare grace — the images we see here lend themselves to a deep and nuanced understanding of Lowndes County at the time; not just the shared, communal efforts but the mapping of both community and anti-Blackness as it materialized through the everyday.

A glossy and breezy summation of Black cinema history this is not, and thank goodness for that.

Even if the effect of watching two mega-screen icons banter back and forth for an hour and change doesn’t add up to much, Clooney and Roberts still have a sort of sparkle between them. It is the exact sort of wholly inoffensive, if bland, charisma that’s perfect for low-key, weekend watching (made even better in your pyjamas and on your couch).

There is a sincerity here that is unafraid of itself and – in what is most certainly a love letter to the beguiling and tumultuous affair that is girlhood – Catherine Called Birdy feels unique and special in a way that speaks directly to Birdy and other uncontainable girls like her.

With a story this well-trodden, exhausted even, the contributions that “On the Come Up” makes are too limited. It feels dated, both in scope and in form.

What Cregger best accomplishes with Barbarian is an unhinged sort of storytelling that nevertheless feels calculated in its design. It knows that comedy and horror are two sides of the same coin, and synthesizes both while also playfully knocking loose a screw or two.

A first feature that is fresh as it is concise, “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.” presents a toothy vision of evangelical life without losing sight of the feeling that remains when the facade of it all finally falls.

The Black Phone is an enjoyable watch, for sure, but it lacks a certain agility, which keeps it from being as great as we want it to be.

It’s an edge-of-your-seat crowd-pleaser that cares enough to develop its story world and characters just as well as its jump-scares and tension.

While the tone and feel of Nope is wonderfully atmospheric and expansive, it also feels as if it comes at the expense of characters possessing deep interior lives or a story world that is well and evenly plotted.

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.

Official Competition is a coy satire that makes welcome use of biting meta-commentary and self-reflexive critique.

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 par for the course in terms of its premise as well as much of its plotting, “Marvelous and the Black Hole” is still somewhat refreshing in its visual style and experimentation.

Paris, 13th District is not a revelation of a film, but it is a charismatic collection of moments worth spending time with.

It is a film that asks audiences to take the plunge into chaos and confusion, so that we’re able to fully see the innate humanity of what remains when the dust of it all settles.

The film’s greatest achievement is the ease with which it traverses the delicate territory of its characters’ lives without losing the sense of a past both shared and fractured in memory.

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.

Ver Linden has the potential to twist and upend expectations – to play with genre and character in a way that reworks and remixes both film history and storytelling. Instead, she spends the majority of her film’s runtime vaguely approaching those intentions rather than actually materializing them. It is a tiring series of runarounds that viewers will lose patience for.

West’s direction is exacting and rigorous. From the filmmaker’s more formal experimentations right down to the soundtrack, which is perfect, X feels like the exact movie its maker set out to create. Also on the money is Mia Goth’s performance as Maxine, a starry-eyed ingenue who is equal parts ordinary and glittering in her ambition and sexuality.

It doesn’t just offer up the most palatable aspects of horror as a genre; instead, it pushes it to its limits through a complete, and undoubtedly satisfying, reworking.

The beauty of a film such as Dog is that it is one of many, omnipresent in its ordinariness and commonplace in its undertaking – a brain holiday, if you will. It’s another notch in the filmography of a crowd-pleasing A-lister, another run-of-the-mill movie to emote with when we can’t feel much else.

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.

Buoyed by its urgent yet playful references to the real-life history of the Black West, Netflix’s newest genre outing The Harder They Fall is an energetic and poppy crowd-pleaser of a film made even better by its punky indifference toward staid conventions of period filmmaking.

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.

Laurent is determined in mapping the depiction of the patriarchal violence endured under both the supposition of scientific method as well as the social order of the world outside of the institution; however, the film struggles to keep a similar pace and substance within its story world.

Not precious, but humanist, The Gravedigger’s Wife is a striking first from a filmmaker and cast we should hope to see more of.

Fuqua is reliable in his continued ability to craft tense and measured films for broad audiences looking for complicated tales of morality.

There is an urgency to these stylistic choices which ask us how we might best realize, through image and sound, both the memory and feeling of violence, of hope, of salvation for the damned. As in life, the grotesque and the beautiful exist concurrently and are each given fair weight.

Amin’s story is given life and depth, charted here with a care for his wholeness rather than too simply his refugee status.

While Neptune Frost is at no loss for multi-faceted thinking, its development of these concepts too often remains at the surface of meaning. The Black futures envisioned here are largely concerned with aesthetics and, while sonically and visually lush, seem hollow in comparison to the range of their full potential.

In its attempts to revisit the original film’s discrepancies, DaCosta’s film ends up only retracing its narrative inconsistencies with full force and even deeper perplexity. Gone is the alluring entanglement of erotics and fright, replaced here by flat characters limply stumbling over a script intent on hitting us over the head with its social commentary.

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.

Bravo’s style echoes King’s own: It is fun and whimsical, formally playful, sometimes bordering on the fantastic but always grounded in the real and the intimate.

As a filmmaker, Questlove utilizes his celebrity connections more than he does original directorial vision, trading instead in long-established, standard documentary structure and form. Summer of Soul is polished, but it pales in stark comparison to the raw footage and energy of the Harlem Cultural Festival.

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

It’s a film to be watched not for its more literal filmmaking achievements, but rather for its ability to make you feel seen, with vulnerability and with love.

Truth and delusion intermingle within this space, materializing not as spectacle or doubt, but rather as an embodied, if not literalized, study of the ways in which women attempt to intellectually and emotionally make sense of their experiences of exploitation.

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.

A deeply aware film, Rose Plays Julie allows for the fantastic as a means and space of catharsis.

A deceptively simple and concise narrative structure allows Ford to parse her subject and characters with a graceful internal complexity that shows rather than tells.

One Night In Miami is an accomplishment relative to the standards of its industry, but for filmgoers seeking new and exciting work that exists outside of that orbit, King’s film is one that you’ve seen before.

Vinterberg is a master of storytelling and character here, bringing forth equal parts tragicomedy and suspense in a way that is refreshingly eager to be grounded in the ordinary realities of life.

With its visual, sonic and cultural gestures, the film is nothing less than a love letter to West Indian life, and makes home in its political figures and artists, its iconography, its food, its music, its gestures and movements all shared here on screen.

Antebellum is a film that lives smugly within its final reveal – and what’s worse, this reveal is more groan-inducing than anything else.