Egg throws a bunch of interesting ideas at the wall, hoping one will stick. Its most profound moments are the genuine ones between Tina and Karen, when the film isn’t trying to shock and provoke with dry satire that occasionally misses the mark.

Buffalo Boys is a messy, interesting, fun romp in cross-cultural interplay.

There is a clarity to every performance from start to finish, from Roberts all the way down. Yes, the thriller elements that are introduced never fully connect with the tone of the overall experience, but it’s a minuscule criticism.

One of the most dark and emotionally deafening documentaries I’ve ever witnessed, there’s no easy way to comprehend The Act of Killing’s total impact and how affecting it truly is.

As a viewing experience, it is relentlessly harrowing, bordering on the traumatizing. Yet while Son of Saul dares to delve even further into the horror than the majority of Holocaust films, never once does it so much as threaten to slip into exploitative territory.

Zemeckis has crafted a work that may be dismissed and forgotten by the general public, but will inevitably remain a curiosity for cinephiles and auteurists everywhere. Not a bad feat for a guy embarking upon the fourth decade of his career.

These characters are sufficiently complex and intertwined to remain interesting, but how they interact can be uninspiring.

The film becomes a document of Ola’s lost innocence, hardening her to the reality that faith only gets us so far.

The gags involve cocaine, bees, primitive MMA, raw unions, and a selfie that goes horribly wrong with the queen, all of which are terribly tired and unfunny. This is the kind of damaged goods studios have been quietly selling to streaming services.

Amazing Grace is a rousing performance lensed with simple, raw, intimate filmmaking that’s unforgettable and nourishing for the soul.

Bumblebee may sport a thoughtful character arc and a throwback vibe, but it’s not meaningfully different than the other five entries in the Transformers series. There’s still plenty of laughably stupid junk to wade through in order to find the good bits.

History has validated the view of these people as one of the major causes of modern ills, but Vice is so concerned with wallowing in the past that it has no idea how to say anything new.

Ultimately, there’s just too much extra baggage for Mary Poppins Returns to soar to great heights.

Spider-Verse feels fresh precisely because it breathes new life into an old story without abandoning the basics.

It’s always frustrating when a documentary is so intent on one story that it plainly misses a more interesting one that’s, just… right there.

Maybe The Mercy‘s greatest strength is that pragmatism to fuel its eleventh-hour chastisement of anyone blind to Hallworth’s complicity.

Though the satire Huang employs here is charming, it conflicts sharply with the atmosphere of hopeless melancholy. In juggling the two, Huang never quite manages to do justice to either tone. As a result, the film can feel a bit messy and occasionally frustrating.

So we’re left with a problematic façade that can’t avoid tainting the thought-provoking crime mystery unfolding beneath it.

The Cleaners ably raises questions around the issue without following through on tying them together, often seeming like it’s simply bouncing around to cover all the relevant topics until it’s time to wrap up. That’s a letdown, but it gives us some noteworthy moments along its way.

Overlord is a pure hell fest, unabashed in its fashioning of tattered grindhouse attire and yet never cheeky in its delivery.

Farrelly is telling a heart-warming, comical buddy story first and foremost, and Green Book, for better or worse, feels more like a wholehearted familial embrace than a treatise on the state of race in America today.

Chronicling Bland’s own Facebook activism along with an examination of the mysterious circumstances of her death, the film is part legal procedural, police mystery, and an exploration of the kind of racism that led to her arrest in the first place.

It’s sad that Fantastic Beasts pulls off what I assumed was impossible: It turned an imaginative fantasy world into dreary wallpaper.

Of Fathers and Sons is a vital addition to the cultural picture of the Syrian conflict.

For forty minutes we become intimately aware of Oliver’s sci-fi conceit through heightened emotions, visual puzzles, and potential betrayals. It’s the perfect set-up for a thriller built on exclusion and yet it becomes much more.

At a time when Islam has become weaponized as a synonym for ISIS, we need glimpses at its positivity and humanity. That doesn’t mean Mu’min sanitizes things (a lot happens that could reinforce reductive stereotypes of social conservatism and familial oppression), only that she’s creating healthy representations at once relatable, laudable, and flawed. Nothing is black and white.

It’s a shame because McDermott effectively toes the line between dorky and menacing (before the film explains which is real), Plummer is great playing with a loaded deck of anxieties and insecurities, and Beaty performs her role perfectly until the writing abandons what made her necessary.

Mazzei expertly creates this sense of contrasting arguments through the mystery she’s crafted, letting its terror metaphorically represent the struggle sex workers combat psychologically thanks to America’s prudish nature forcing them to lead dual lives.