Steven Scaife

By keeping some of its cards close to its chest, Heel respects our intelligence, which helps it to earn its sneakily moving ending.

One senses that Rod Blackhurst knows that Dolly is undernourished, but his attempts to jazz it up by splitting it into transparently titled chapters only calls further attention to that dearth of imagination.

Easy as it may be to imagine a more artful, restrained, and introspective version of Redux Redux, the one we got is satisfying enough that you may want to take it out for another spin.

Despite the affinity the Adams clan has displayed for spooky, goopy imagery in the past, Mother of Flies finds them reluctant to fully exercise those talents for fear of tipping their hand.

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.

To get to the primal thrill of racing, Iwaisawa Kenji uses just about every technique at his disposal.

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.

Julian Glander powerfully channeling the ennui of his characters with images of everything from vacant parking lots to empty swimming pools.

Flying Lotus and his collaborators give Ash enough visual flair to occasionally transcend such limitations as forgettable characters with fuzzy motivations.

The film provides Paul W.S. Anderson with a sturdy canvas for his unique brand of gaudy, campy cool.

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

The film is able to suggest great depths by withholding so much, by having characters express what they feel only in abstract terms during a fraught, transitional period of their lives.

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.

Gints Zilbalodis’s animated feature is movingly attuned to its characters’ primal instincts.

Adam Elliot, whose work is no stranger to despondency, never allows the film to fully succumb to despair.

Jason Yu’s film may not reach its full potential, but it offers a devious commentary on the all-too-human desire for easy explanations.

Rather than deepening or complicating the original work, Apartment 7A engages with it purely on franchise terms, as in how it foregrounds the Castavets for much of the runtime.

His Three Daughters sneaks up on you, for as chatty, monologue-forward as Jacobs’s screenplay may be, it conveys so much through absence and suggestion.

The craft brought to bear on Only the River Flows is captivating, but when it comes to matters of story, it cultivates a frustrating air of disinterest.

Chris Skotchdopole’s feature debut is a tantalizing mix of the absurd and the mundane.

Thanks to its expert staging, the film doesn’t lose much in the way of immediacy.

The sense of repetition that the film leans into in order to acknowledge the inescapable grip of the state is as much a feature as it is a bug.

The film is held together by the intensity of its haunted-looking cast and the dour atmosphere.

However pleasurable and pretty Chicken for Linda may be in its individual scenes, it doesn’t so much achieve harmony through its balancing of contrasting elements as it fully surrenders to childlike whimsy.

As in his prior work, the far-reaching curiosity and fascinatingly conflicted nature of Fessenden’s perspective is still his greatest strength.

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

Even when it’s painting its story in broad strokes, the film plays expertly to audience emotion.

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.

The film is an insightful look at modern discontent and the pandemonium that it breeds.

Befitting the unseen forces that seem to drive the characters, writer-directors Fernanda Valadez and Astrid Rondero bring a haunted, dreamlike undercurrent to the film similar to sequences from their prior collaboration, Identifying Features.

The film isn’t designed to challenge what you think you know about the Church of Satan.

Whenever Mayhem! makes any attempt at character building, it feels as if we’re watching a trashy DTV movie, and as a result reveals itself as a run-of-the-mill revenge flick that practically crawls toward its preordained destination.

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

In the end, Leave the World Behind is content to blandly shrug in the direction of an amorphous calamity, reaching for a profundity that it fails to achieve.

The film coasts far on the pleasant surprise of some sharp plotting.

Demián Rugna’s harrowing film spares no one from the cruelty of its world.

Flora and Son is far more invested in making its characters likable and cute rather than risking audience sympathies.

Perpetrator cycles through characters and settings at a considerable clip, never stopping long enough to flesh them out beyond an outline.

Charlotte Regan’s film is a baffling clash of two incompatible visions.

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.

For all its formal playfulness, the film never loses its grip on the interior lives to its characters.

There’s a riveting story somewhere here about the crumbling of the Soviet Union and the stranglehold of capitalism on ’80s culture, but Tetris never quite locates it.

The film defaults to the most pedestrian narrative turns imaginable when it’s not just recycling bits from the series.

The Quiet Girl earns its most emotionally powerful scenes because of the way that it so gracefully convinces us that it wasn’t even building toward them in the first place.

Consecration ends up not just gimmicky but derivative of Christopher Smith’s own prior work.

Clay Tatum’s film is wholly and refreshingly uninterested in tugging at the heartstrings.

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.

Throughout, writer-director Carlota Pereda announces herself as a skilled manipulator of audience sympathies.

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

There’s an admirably propulsive, single-minded sense of purpose to the film’s commitment to gore.

The Deer King leaves one with the impression that it hasn’t given itself enough room to truly soar.

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.

Throughout, Josephine Decker effortlessly keys her intimate and eccentric style to her main character’s complicated inner turmoil.

The film provides no space to explore its relationships, and as a result there’s little friction to the climax.

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

The film is a thoughtful examination of the human desire for it and the accompanying hope that it may exorcise the emptiness we feel.

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.

The film has the knowing swagger of something on the cutting edge but none of the self-awareness to realize it’s late to the party.

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

Violation impressively pushes against the typically straightforward trajectory of the rape-revenge film.

The film’s characters hardly possess a sense of a history or an interior life to adequately convey racism’s psychic toll.

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

The film is as much about the act of seeing and observing as it is about not seeing, about struggling to recognize that which might not clarify much at all.

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.

Roseanne Liang leverages the absolute implausibility of the film’s later scenes into something brisk and exciting right to the very end.

Nicolas Cage’s amusing turn as a kooky hermit with an affinity for newspaper hats often feels awkwardly spliced into the film.

The film has an exciting, lived-in quality that elevates what are otherwise some markedly unsteady attempts at horror.

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.

For all of its ostensible thoughtfulness, in trying to describe “real art,” Random Acts of Violence ultimately doesn’t describe anything at all.

The film is strikingly fixated on exploring loss and pain on an intimate and personal scale.

The film heralds the arrival a bold and formidable voice in horror cinema.

The film’s animation leans into its most jerky, artificial qualities, all the better to enhance the atmosphere of bizarre unreality.

Rather than a simplistic, straightforward parable of greed, Bad Education depicts its true events with a surprising amount of depth and ambiguity.

Through its exploration of Selah’s complexities, as well as the bravado and posturing that comes with being a credible drug dealer, Selah and the Spades locates a larger truth about the presentation of self and maintaining one’s image.

The film’s cat-and-mouse antics play out with no sense of escalation or invention.

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

The film is at its weakest when it has to do drama, since the fallout of Mo and Zeke’s actions feels perfunctory and tossed-off in the rush to an ending, a hasty come-down after the proverbial party.

Writer-director Jason Lei Howden’s humor might have been tolerable if his film was at least reasonably imaginative.

Nicolas Pesce evincing little of the promise he showed in his prior films, and even less drive to remake the old into something new.

The film gets so lost in its affected idiosyncrasies that it stops probing any discernible human feelings.

It focuses equally on moments of shared connection and incidental loss until the two feel indistinguishable.

Sergio Pablos’s film is essentially a metaphor for its own unique and refreshing mode of expression.

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.

Behind the self-awareness and the irony is merely a hollow emotional core, a lack of anything to say because saying something would require ambition rather than complacent winks and nods.

In the film’s world, there can be no real resistance, as the suburbs have already won.

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

Promare often feels like a maximalist season finale trimmed of any build-up, a climax that’s outstanding to watch yet empty beyond its pure spectacle.

Larry Fessenden diagnoses the rot of our era through the shifting personalities and power dynamics of solipsistic men.

Subtlety dissipates as Justin Chon’s film grasps for something louder and more obvious.