Thanks to some fantastic performances and a patient, well-crafted script, this is a film that should find international audiences interested in some truly adult storytelling. There’s enough originality and sophistication here that an English language redux wouldn’t be unheard of, making one hope that any translation maintains the craft and elegance of Sødahl’s presentation.

One film shouldn’t have to handle the weight of representing an entire geographic region, and I don’t expect Raya and the Last Dragon to do so, though it appears to desperately want to. But taken purely as an action epic, Raya and the Last Dragon is a real treat.

Tom & Jerry is, in many ways, aiming to be a live-action cartoon. But it fails in so many basic ways of cinematic storytelling. The story is dull, the characters are single-dimensionally bland, and the performances are stiff.

Flora & Ulysses is, at its core, a very nice and sweet film. It’s low-key, but frankly, that’s fine. Sometimes, the stakes in life don’t have to get much higher than whether or not two struggling adults can find each other again, and whether or not a child can traverse a world without a strong family unit.

This is a major misfire that will have you scratching your head and wondering how it all came to be.

There’s a lot to love here; searing heretic cinematography included, as long as you’re a fan of horror flicks that *love* taking their damn time. It’s emotionally invasive, disturbing, and brutally unforgiving once Sator’s presence takes hold.

Earwig and the Witch feels like a film going through the motions, but not understanding the emotion behind the big narrative beats it’s trying to pull off. It’s a film matched by its flat animation style: incomplete and uninspired.

The comedy on display here is so forced and without charm that it made me wish Beckwith and company had abandoned any attempt at humor and instead tried to make Together Together more of a straightforward drama with occasionally funny moments. That’s the better version of this film, and you can see it trying to claw its way out from beneath all the quirks.

Is this a horror movie? A mystery? A thriller? There are elements of all of those things here, but the movie defies easy categorization, and its low-fi vibe and metaphor-heavy approach will not be everyone’s cup of tea. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair seems uninterested in adhering to genre trappings, instead focusing its attention on ideas about change.

Wild Indian is a singular achievement; a film so raw and centered that it dares you to look away from scenes that simmer and burn. It’s too early in 2021 to jump the gun and start calling out “best of the year” material, but Wild Indian certainly deserves to enter the conversation. It’s a film you won’t soon forget.

It’s pop art made into a feature film, which is a swell idea — if there’s an emotional core that can carry the audience through the staid surrealism. But Audley and the rest of the cast choose to play their characters like stoic ciphers, barely formed archetypes who glide through the film as if in some kind of permanent dream state themselves, making Strawberry Mansion feel even less anchored to reality.

The movie works mainly because of the magnetism and sincerity of its cast, who are giving it their all throughout. Engels and Noel have excellent chemistry, and their world is populated with charismatic, dynamic supporting players, best represented by Saunderson’s maximalist take on Mercutio. If this is what it takes to introduce a new generation to a classic story, so be it.

There’s a beating heart at the center of First Date, but unfortunately, the movie is less interested in exploring that central relationship and more amused with its zany cast of idiotic supporting characters. Good pacing can only get you so far.

Haunting, harrowing, and hypnotic, Eight for Silver is a werewolf story with a lot on its mind.

It follows in the footsteps of the Mr. Rogers documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? by shining a light on the making of the iconic series, revealing things you may not have known about its creators, and bringing some good old fashioned nostalgia to your heart.

This portrait of Sparks is just as lighthearted and delightful as the music you’ll be tapping your toe to throughout the entire movie. As soon as the movie is over, you’ll probably be adding Sparks songs to your streaming playlists and hoping that this won’t be the last time that Edgar Wright feels compelled to give us a deep dive into one of his favorite musical acts.

It’s an interesting idea on page, but in John and the Hole, it is all a little too opaque to make sense of Sisto’s muted portrait of adolescence.

There’s are undeniably great moments in Judas and the Black Messiah, but one can’t help but think the movie needed to push itself just a little bit further. But perhaps the raw power radiating off the screen via the performances is enough.

A maniacal whirlwind of cinematic insanity, it feels equally likely that Prisoners of the Ghostland could become a cult classic or disappear into the fog. Whether its overall inscrutability is a bug or a feature remains to be seen.

The dreamy images and the simmering passions of the film lingered with me.

While these misadventures could have easily resulted in a more chaotic sort of indie that loses focus, they’ve kept the attention squarely on the characters and each part of this wild day serves their arc in some kind of meaningful way. Somehow, this movie makes light out of total darkness without losing any of the heaviness that comes with it.

Mass is a masterful directorial debut for Fran Kranz.

Tearful confessions and big dramatic beats fail when contrasted with the emotions that swell up from the unblemished beauty of the landscape. It ultimately left me cold and feeling as if Land‘s central drama was unable to compete with nature.

A Glitch in the Matrix is more than just a conspiracy theory movie: it’s about how we function in a societal system, how we interact with other people, and what happens when we embrace a worldview which seemingly offers answers to things in life that don’t make sense to us. But the movie stumbles over its muddled execution of some of those ideas, and as a result, can’t help but feel like a letdown.

Underneath all the jokes and humorous moments, the movie is fundamentally about how important it is to love yourself – and about how something so seemingly simple can sometimes be incredibly difficult.

The final 20 or so minutes of In the Earth are downright impenetrable, and while that’s no doubt the point, it doesn’t make the experience any less frustrating. In a sense, Wheatley has successfully recreated the experience of stumbling around, lost in the woods, unable to see the forest for the trees.

With its flat hand-drawn characters moving briskly across the richly detailed backgrounds, Cryptozoo is bursting to the seams with dazzling, shocking, brutal (and edgy, this is an adult animated film, remember) visuals.

Overall, the electricity of the music and the novelty of seeing some of these performers absolutely shred during this period of their careers easily overshadows any of its flaws.