William Repass

The Feast makes a stab at drawing out modern, very real anxieties around wealth disparity and ecological devastation without falling back on genre tropes, asking us to consider how the land itself may come to feast on the rich.

Settlers allows for weighty themes to play out inside a cramped domestic setting, wary of easy answers or moral platitudes.

By forcing us to identify with its largely comatose protagonist, By Design arouses resentment in order to shake us out of torpor.

The story’s attempt at an excoriation of spectacle and empty pleasure comes off as little more than a reluctant swipe.

Notable as it is for evoking a kind of cosmic banality, writer-director Bruno Dumont’s anti-space opera The Empire runs into same the pitfall as many parodies of its kind.

Georgis Grigorakis’s film may not revolutionize the western genre by transposing it to an unlikely setting, but it doesn’t dilute it either.

The overbearing plot of the film sadly obscures the humanity of its characters.

Beneath its perfectly entertaining surface, the film is a mess of contradictions that fails to live up to its own potential.

However faithfully the film transposes the plot and themes of the source material, it struggles to capture the spirit, ironing out D.H. Lawrence’s modernity-skeptical modernism and losing sight of his poetic vision.

For all its empathy, Late Shift upholds the dubious virtue of self-sacrifice that underpins the Protestant work ethic.

The film is an object lesson in what can result when a work of art subordinates itself to a message.

The film has little to add on the subject of the interplay of politics and infectious disease, then or now.

She Will can’t decide if its horror or comedy, nor does it strike the balance that would harmoniously hybridize them.

Cleansed of all risk and personality, Spin Me Round subsides, as though with a sigh, into the reheated sauce of mediocrity.

Throughout, Barbarians oscillates between smugness and apprehensiveness about the film that it’s trying to be.