| | | The Bikeriders (2023) | Just flick through Lyons' book instead — any photo you land on will have more depth than the vast majority of scenes here. - Looper.com |
| | | (2023) | Sy creates an intoxicating, woozy atmosphere that sucks you into this hermetically-sealed community, which remains beguiling even as she doesn’t explore many themes surrounding her dark relationship drama with enough depth. - The Film Stage |
| | | All We Imagine as Light (2024) | a tale distinct to the current climate in India, and yet, like all the best stories, there’s a universality in spite of the cultural specificity. - Vague Visages |
| | | Locust (2024) | Ignore the specific cultural milieu; this is a broadly written tale of generational angst written in a way that young viewers can easily insert themselves into, attempting to be meaningful to all and likelier to prove meaningless to most. - View of the Arts |
| | | The Garfield Movie (2024) | In trying to reinvent the lazy feline for modern kids, the filmmakers have lost track of the comedic tone that has helped these simple, gag-driven stories endure for decades. - Looper.com |
| | | Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (2024) | Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In achieves the impossible, thrilling with each elaborately choreographed fight even if the characters are archetypes too broad to invest in, and their every move designed with a lack of harsh realism. - View of the Arts |
| | | IF (2024) | A movie about the boundless imagination of children that could only have been made by a cynical adult mind. - Looper.com |
| | | Coma (2022) | Coma conjures up the spirit of 2020 like no other movie thus far, often feeling every bit as disorienting as it was to scroll through social media timelines during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. - Vague Visages |
| | | Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024) | It has the ideal third act for a Planet of the Apes movie– whether you want to sit through a near 90 minute journey that represents everything wrong with dystopian world-building in contemporary blockbusters to get there, however, is up to you. - The Film Stage |
| | | Humane (2024) | A well-engineered, single-location thriller that prioritizes bloody, gut-punch twists and turns over the more thoughtful introspection that typically accompanies this in a Cronenberg effort. - The Film Stage Read More | Posted Apr 24, 2024 |
| | | Back to Black (2024) | It ghoulishly holds the singer accountable for many of the tragedies and misfortunes she suffered. - The Film Stage |
| | | Civil War (2024) | Civil War is a lot smarter than meets the eye, and the film is far more incisive in its cultural critique than its director’s simplistic interview comments may make it seem. - Vague Visages |
| | | The First Omen (2024) | What The First Omen lacks in innovation it makes up for in boldness, pushing familiar supernatural genre tropes about the secret relationship between the Church and the Devil to ideological extremes. - Vague Visages |
| | | The People's Joker (2022) | The People’s Joker may take the shape of an unholy hybrid between personal essay and superhero-skewering satire, but it doesn’t forget what makes the best works within the genre it is parodying tick. - The Film Stage |
| | | Mothers' Instinct (2024) | The beats are played as unsubtly as you’d expect within a melodrama that was likely aspiring to the highs of Douglas Sirk, but it crucially understands that sincerity is the key to selling such broad emotion. - The Film Stage |
| | | Wicked Little Letters (2023) | [Wicked Little Letters] doesn’t deserve to be written off as a frothy comedy where Jessie Buckley hurls curse words at Olivia Colman, but I was left wishing the filmmakers would have grappled with the full, weighty potential of this material. - AwardsWatch |
| | | Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024) | The widespread criticism of the "Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire" trailer, that it looked like the filmmakers thought they were creating the next part of a sci-fi saga rather than a comedy one, bears out in the finished product. - Looper.com |
| | | Femme (2023) | The film wouldn’t have the same power if robbed of their sexual dynamic, which is the latest rebuke to any audience member arguing that such scenes serve no narrative purpose. - The Film Stage |
| | | Road House (2024) | Gyllenhaal manages to hold this tonally inconsistent film together, but he’s the only person involved who has some clear handle on how this story should be told from beginning to end. - The Film Stage |
| | | Io Capitano (2023) | Io Capitano feels carefully researched in its subject matter, while the narrative itself is constructed with an intensity far more characteristic of Garrone’s genre work. - Vague Visages |
| | | Madame Web (2024) | Every moment of campy enjoyment is punctured by the death rattle of the franchise machine it's been forcibly placed within. - Looper.com |
| | | The Monk and the Gun (2023) | Imagine a Jia Zhangke effort layered in whimsy, and you’re halfway to understanding the film’s approach to dramatizing these themes. - The Film Stage |
| | | 20 Days in Mariupol (2023) | Like many documentaries about conflicts still unfolding at the time of premiere, 20 Days in Mariupol is both essential and far from perfect. - The Film Stage |
| | | Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023) | James Gunn may be scrapping the DCEU and starting again from scratch, but it's strange to see a film that's already accepted this fate, devoid of any signs of life that would make the powers that be reconsider their decision. - Looper.com |
| | | Evil Does Not Exist (2023) | Other critics have heralded this as another masterpiece which continues the director’s strong recent run, but its very deliberately orchestrated messiness fell a little flat for me. - View of the Arts |
| | | Perfect Days (2023) | (Hirayama is) a warm, welcoming presence, largely through gestures alone. He’s also one of the most uninteresting figures you could think to craft an entire character study around. - View of the Arts |
| | | The Boys in the Boat (2023) | Overly reliant on cliches and barely diving into what makes this story unique beyond some surface level lip service, The Boys in the Boat is the expected result from a journeyman filmmaker half-heartedly ticking another genre off his bucket list. - Vague Visages |
| | | Rebel Moon: Part One - A Child of Fire (2023) | It doesn't work entirely, but there's a thrill to seeing a movie operating on this scale that hasn't been sanitized within an inch of its life. - Looper.com |
| | | The Iron Claw (2023) | Durkin's most accessible film to date. It doesn't tone down his macabre approach to conventional family dramas so much as it stealthily sneaks it into a mainstream sports biopic. - Looper.com |
| | | Concrete Utopia (2023) | I can understand exactly why it was selected as South Korea’s Oscar entry, hitting on international anxieties about the continued resurgence of far-right movements with cultural commentary that is broad but never derivative. - The Film Stage |
| | | Leave the World Behind (2023) | The better version of "Leave the World Behind" might not even need to be more of a taut thriller that gets to the finish line while viewers are still engaged with the mystery — it would just need to have the courage of its B-movie convictions. - Looper.com |
| | | Wonka (2023) | Timothée Chalamet's overly twee take on the chocolate tycoon will likely make audiences look back fondly on Johnny Depp’s poor Michael Jackson imitation in Tim Burton’s remake from 2005. - The Film Stage |
| | | Shayda (2023) | Its portrayal of a childhood under these turbulent circ*mstances is unnerving, Zahednia delivering one of the most revelatory child performances of recent memory––almost entirely through silently terrified reaction shots. - The Film Stage |
| | | Thanksgiving (2023) | When unashamedly embracing a slasher persona, it proves far better than it has any right to be––what a shame these simple genre thrills are tangled in a more confused attempt at horror-comedy. - The Film Stage |
| | | (2023) | One of the more radical franchise blockbusters to have emerged in quite some time, positively reminiscent of the recent "Star Wars" series "Andor" in how it explores the foundations of a rebellion viewers know is doomed to fail. - Looper.com |
| | | Priscilla (2023) | The subjects of Coppola's films have long been women in the cultural spotlight, or those merely enraptured by the idea of celebrity, but none of her efforts to date have communicated the poisonous nature of fame to the extent that Priscilla manages. - Looper.com |
| | | Five Nights at Freddy's (2023) | I have no idea whether the franchise's die-hard fans will respond positively to the movie — all I know is this introduction to the world of Freddy Fazbear's Pizza was enough to make me never want to spend another night there. - Looper.com |
| | | Cobweb (2023) | Cobweb satisfies as a comedy, but doesn’t feel particularly indistinguishable from other movies about making movies, despite a richer, more unique cultural milieu. - View of the Arts |
| | | Daaaaaali! (2023) | At the time of year where every other film is a biopic chasing prestige respectability, we are lucky to have Quentin Dupieux, the prolific, serious-minded, silly filmmaker perfectly positioned to take a sledgehammer to the genre. - The Film Stage |
| | | All of Us Strangers (2023) | All of Us Strangers is a film that becomes all the more haunting the further from it you get. - Vague Visages |
| | | The Book of Clarence (2023) | It’s immediately noticeable that his attempts at modernizing a genre that was at its cultural peak in the 1950s largely comes down to making everything play like a music video. - The Film Stage |
| | | Red Island (2023) | The further removed Campillo gets from this perspective, the less assured Red Island feels. I got the sense there’s a marvelous coming-of-age film hidden somewhere within the DNA of his story––this iteration, alas, isn’t it. - The Film Stage |
| | | Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) | The story is so masterfully told, that it isn’t until the penultimate scene that it becomes apparent that Scorsese was aiming to reflect upon the ethics of true crime storytelling all along. - Vague Visages |
| | | The Exorcist: Believer (2023) | By no means a bad movie, but when you could be watching the original instead, you'll need a lot more than the power of Christ to compel you to watch it. - Looper.com |
| | | May December (2023) | I highly suspect we won’t see a richer character study this year. - Vague Visages |
| | | The Hypnosis (2023) | It doesn’t keep circling the same themes of social anxiety so much as it keeps digging a bigger hole for its characters with each new interaction. - The Film Stage |
| | | The Creator (2023) | It makes up for its lack of thought-provoking ideas with capital-B Blockbuster spectacle. I probably won't remember the story in a few days' time, but there are images from this movie that will be seared into my brain forever. - Looper.com |
| | | Cassandro (2023) | Bernal is drastically miscast, but after watching the movie, I can't imagine this character brought to life by anyone other than him. - Looper.com |
| | | A Haunting in Venice (2023) | By the halfway point, the most unexpected thing of all happened: I found myself longing for Gal Gadot to reappear to liven things up a bit. - Looper.com |
| | | Remembering Every Night (2022) | Yui Kiyohara has succeeded in making a film documenting the pleasures too inconsequential to effectively capture in writing. - The Film Stage |
