Steven Scaife

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 can-do spirit of Dead Lover, as evidenced by the way it couples goofy sound effects with cuts and camera movements, takes it a long way.

The film bottles a palpable emotion of unabashed joy, even when the rest of it seems to barely hold together.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The film is more straight-faced than Alexandre Aja’s prior work, trading absurd kills for narrow escapes from gaping alligator jaws.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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