Steven Scaife

WTO/99 sets out to correct misrepresentation by corporate media about the aims of the movement, but that attempt is hampered by the recycling of much of the same news footage from news broadcasts.

The film plays a long game with audiences that frustrates far more than it illuminates.

Pulled awkwardly in so many directions, this Toxic Avenger all but comes apart at the seams.

The balls-out shock value doesn’t detract from the fact that Fixed is more square than its makers probably think it is.

The film single-mindedly sees its elderly characters as objects of disgust or receptacles for harm.

A few scenes show glimmers of promise for what Alex Thompson can achieve when he’s more in his wheelhouse. It’s a shame that the horror and tension that make up the bulk of Rounding are so clearly outside of it.

By the time we’re watching whole conversations be drowned out by noise of pounding rain, the abstract tendencies of Armand begin to feel like an act of unintentional self-sabotage

Michiel Blanchart’s film often feels like a patchwork of half-developed ideas, each more loosely and tenuously woven into the whole than the last.

The film falters when it attempts to mold its best instincts into a discernible narrative shape.

For how committed it is to convincing the audience of the profundity of a rudimentary point, the film’s measured pacing comes to feel like a kind of torture.

J.A. Bayona rarely lets his images speak for themselves, which is frustrating given his obvious gift for poetic, almost surreal succinctness.

Because we’re tasked with inferring so much about the characters, especially their pasts, so much of the film’s romance is unconvincing.

With copious scenes of Nicolas Cage going buck wild, it can hardly be faulted for failing to give audiences what they want.

The hot streak for Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon cools with My Father’s Dragon.

The film ties itself into many knots as it chases the superficial sugar high of a big reveal.

The film doesn’t quite live up to its promising premise and handful of clever camera gimmicks.

Ultrasound never quite figures out how to keep going once its mysteries have been unraveled.

Keating’s film forgets the cardinal rule of good pastiche: that if you’re not building something new from familiar pieces then you’re just regurgitating old ideas.

After a while, writer-director Iuli Gerbase’s boldly mundane take on forced isolation gives way to a regular sort of mundanity.

The film capsizes in the absence of a compelling center for Mélanie Laurent to hang her directorial panache.

We Need to Do Something mainly succeeds at suggesting a more compelling film beyond its bathroom walls.

Travis Stevens’s film is psychologically astute, until it gives itself over to turning subtext into extremely legible text.

The problem with Earwig and the Witch has more to do with its confused plotting than its more or less serviceable animation.

Hunted intends to make a show of our desensitization to predator-prey relationships, but the greater purpose of its self-awareness never quite comes into clear focus.

If Quirke’s film means to mimic the tunnel vision of its protagonist, it does so perhaps too effectively, losing its thematic potency as it travels on a predictable trajectory, involving spooky drawings and sisterly spats, all the while leaving the existential miasma sitting out of frame.

It comes across like yet another casualty in the long line of stories about men having their eyes opened by their angelic girlfriends.

Alice Waddington’s sci-fi fantasy never finds a cohesive story wrapper for its themes.

The film is loud and obvious about declaring its themes, as if to distract from their ultimate shallowness.

The film is an aimless, albeit sometimes funny, chronicle of absurd behavior and government ineptitude.