If Walker has some interesting ideas and an eye for panache, the whole leaves much to be desired.

The humor is infectious, the pop-culture nerd affinity relatable, and the familial struggles resonant. And it’s messy because so is life. Its happy ending is about learning to listen. That’s how everyone wins.

The result is as funny as it’s excruciating and alienating as it’s relatable.

Maybe it doesn’t stimulate your intellect as much as other recent genre fare, but it definitely offers an engrossing setting through which to travel for 80 minutes.

There’s something so hollow about a production such as this, where it feels Netflix simply maneuvered parts of its algorithm into a choose-your-own-ingredients food dispenser to churn out whatever they thought audiences would click on if they saw it on their homepage for one week before the next one drops. Ryan Reynolds? Mark Ruffalo? Vague sci-fi imagery? Sure, sweetie, let’s put that on while we scroll our phones as dinner’s cooking, and fall asleep right before the kid in the movie starts using his video game skills to pilot drones that attack people.

In an era of superhero gluttony, in which these familiar stories, characters, and visuals tend to bleed together, The Batman holds the rare distinction of creating and embracing its own identity.

The Fan Connection is a bit rough around the edges as far as production value goes due to its shoestring, one-woman show budget helped only by a Kickstarter campaign during post-production, but don’t let that deter you from seeing the heart and humanity present in every single frame.

While Mother Schmuckers may hit a sweet spot for fans of the delightfully vulgar and distasteful, it reads mostly as a film aiming only to provoke.

The unfortunate truth of the matter is that, like this duo’s supplies, returns diminish with every passing day.

This one sure is a challenge. Lots of that has to do with how the movie’s successes only become apparent after the fact. Its structure is its story, and it folds in on itself as much as it stacks its pieces on top of one another

Simultaneously, Cyrano feels like something new and something old. The best of both worlds.

While there’s always a humorous slant to proceedings (kudos to Shawn Wilson’s endearingly pure park ranger), that edge of danger is where it excels.

A far cry from Bates’ elegant 2012 bloodbath Excision, King Knight is a mostly insipid, overlong sitcom episode not worth tuning in for.

Taste is a lot more than the sum of its influences. The strange, disquieting world Lê beckons us into is entirely his making, and it brims with spell-binding images.

The archival footage gives a time capsule—not just of the sound and styles of the ’60s and ’70s, but a whole society dragged out of Italy’s countryside and into the rapidly industrialized cities.

Robe of Gems isn’t an easy film. Its harrowing content is devoid of optimism and its pacing ensures we wallow in the resulting suffering even if very little of it is actually shown on-screen.

Thomas’ Bravo, recalling both Mikey Saber and Mickey Rourke, has a protruding gut, slicked-back hair, an alcohol problem, and some deep-rooted mommy issues. The film is all his.

Ozon wants to show us how committed a student of Fassbinder he is whilst successfully aping his dramaturgy and tone. But Fassbinder answered to no one.

To twist the common literary-critical saying, Nobody’s Hero is indeed three characters in search of a story, but not an author, whose conviction in his ideas and unique method of shaping a film still marks him as un vrai original.

Drawing a number of deeply felt performances from her cast, it is an aching period piece, if frankly staid, that comes complete with many of the genre’s most reliable tropes: sharp intakes of breath; glances stolen through laced curtains; and love, as ever, in opprobrium.

Bonello looks at the Zoomer state of mind, as he does for much else of importance, and has cutting, perceptive and troubling things to say.

Yes, Dario Argento’s first film in ten years is pretty fun, for a while—and no, not near his best.

It isn’t difficult to imagine Denis–one of the most cerebral, confounding filmmakers we have–constructing Fire, with its oddly trivial love triangle and omnipresent string section, as a duplicitous farce; a way to upend our expectations of how a film like this should look.

Pawo Choyning Dorji’s feature debut Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom captures the juxtaposition of big-city living and small-town surviving in a way that resonates beyond its cultural specificity—we all understand the contrast.

This is red light district cinema in its language and humor; as it reaches its second half, people who lament that film has lost its love of sex and horniness will have their heads turned.

You Mean Everything to Me often feels like the first draft of a story that had more potential than what we see.

Do not let the brief runtime or spartan setting dissuade you. This is nuanced drama, well-felt and well-told.

Utama is a slow-motion look at how communities can falter, how rich heritage can be lost—to indifference from governments as well as a climate crisis that will decimate their way of life. If only it weren’t so gentle in its reminder.