It’s that rare action movie that succeeds because it’s challenging and intriguing, which is a nice way of saying that maybe it could have kicked slightly more ass.

It’s a film with potent ideas, inner conflict, historical imagination, dramatic challenge, queer power, human fragility, humor, sex, pathos. It’s hard to pin down exactly what makes it great, and that’s what makes it great. There’s so much to its muchness that the veneer can hardly contain it, not unlike Taffeta themself.

Better Go Mad in the Wild is transcendent not because of big speeches or underlined ideas, but because of how it lets us sit back and watch two people, both flawed, funny and deeply human, struggle through another day.

The writing is frequently darkly playful, the direction measured and the performances all completely committed, ensuring the portrait of a family in crisis holds together just as they may all split apart.

Colin Minihan knows how to make a gnarly horror film.

It’s a playground for the filmmakers and audience alike, a fantastical space where anything can happen, whether it’s silly or badass or both.

Some movies are movies. Other movies are cocoa. A Merry Little Ex-Mas is the latter.

Not Without Hope never completely comes together but when it works, it’s absorbing disaster filmmaking."

It scrolls past thoughtful ideas, too quickly to fully process them, and the experience is as cacophonous as the typical social media feed. I’ll grant you it’s thematically appropriate but it’s not cohesive filmmaking.

A frequently stunning work of animation that’s also a haunting portrait of isolation, the destructive insidiousness of bullying and our own capacity for cruelty, Kohei Kadowaki’s formidable feature debut “We Are Aliens” is a film of fascinating layers.

A funny and frightening, heartwarming and heartbreaking, confrontational masterwork that explores our shared experience of the present, and reveals what a morbid mistake it is to expect the frivolity of the past to heal our current pains.