Steven Scaife

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.