One of the most fascinating things about Infinite Football is that Porumboiu never feels the need to feed his pal any rope in order to get these moments on camera. The two men are close and the director pointedly takes the time to let us in on his friend’s life.

Kahn’s film taken on its own terms doesn’t seem to be striving for anything beyond an in-the-moment provocation, even if it has the occasional insight.

Shirkers finds the emotional grounding and even universality in a very strange story.

In capturing the crumbling of a family and the scars left behind, Paul Dano has made a fascinatingly complex portrait of the fracturing of American ideals.

Despite suffering from a few tropes and a third act that starts to slowly come off the rails as sympathies change, The Guilty is a riveting mystery creating a race against time that includes false leads, family drama, and the search for a van somewhere within a specific cell tower.

While The Kindergarten Teacher ends at the perfect moment following an extremely strong final ten minutes, it’s ultimately a muddled experience. But then maybe that’s part of the point.

A generous, graceful, full-hearted drama about the complexities of desiring a child when your physiology denies you at every turn.

Assassination Nation may hit buttons in the moment, but looking back, it fades away as an experience as ugly as it is unpleasant.

Most surprising of all, Mandy isn’t solely about the carnage-heavy path for revenge. Cosmatos knows that the impact will be much greater felt if there’s an emotional backbone. Thus, one can feel the soul-churning passion behind every popping eye and crushed skull.

The heist sequence alone is a confident mix of visual inventiveness and nods. What the film does lack, intentionally or not, is a clear moral arrow.

I Am Not a Witch is as fresh as it is provocative despite a few false notes along the way, especially in the film’s third act.

The mixture of historical fact with cinematic experimentation in PROTOTYPE does not feel like a case of exploiting the former merely for the sake of pulling off dazzling visual tricks on the viewer’s spatio-temporal sensibilities.

Despite its brief runtime, the film runs out of steam well before its climax.

As the style begins to wear out its welcome, the promise of a resolution and nifty twist keep things nimble. Like a well-crafted paperback, Search never commits the cardinal sin of being boring.

There is a quality to these performances and an earnestness to the filmmaking that’s more than enough to recommend.

It’s such a step-up in vibrancy, scope, and emotion that it feels like the introduction of an entirely different, more accomplished filmmaker.

There will never be easy answers when dealing with the soul-baring act of producing truly great art, but Josephine Decker’s film is as mesmerizing a plunge into the process as one is likely to find in modern cinema.

While it doesn’t land with as much impact as it should, the contradictory, heart-numbing effects of such a dehabiliting program are conveyed with a keen sense of nuance by Akhavan.

It’s the brains behind the brawn that makes Brawl in Cell Block 99 one of the year’s highlights in the action genre.

An earnest, clear-cut drama about the struggle for one woman’s liberation from the shackles of domesticity, Puzzle does what it sets out to do remarkably well.

For a first half so rich in plot, subtext and genres, it feels somehow frustrating to see Good Manners’s potential stall a little as the feature enters its second part.

There is undeniable craft here, and an impossible-to-ignore signal that everyone involved in the project deserves attention going forward. What does work is strong, sometimes powerful.

One of Eighth Grade‘s greatest strengths is its specificity related to the current generation.

Riley doesn’t offer a great deal of insight, but he clearly has a lot on his mind. Here’s hoping he retains this creative edge on a more focused follow-up.

The intensity is too much to bear in the best possible way. Legrand knows exactly where to position his characters and what’s necessary to break them. It’s a steady crescendo of suspense despite his source of danger never shifting.

Director Tim Wardle lays a lot on the strength of the events he’s covering, and they are indeed compelling enough on their own to hold your interest. The flipside of this is that the film has little power outside of a first viewing.

Leave No Trace’s acute sense of place and how people relate to it makes for great, emotion-laden naturalism.

With such a simple approach to heavy subject matter, Barnard creates a distancing effect that reveals the feebleness of her screenplay and direction.