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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.