Eli Friedberg

The film’s intentionally amateurish visuals are deployed on audiences with the precision of a jackhammer, all in the interest of obscurantism.

Evangelion 3.0 + 1.01: Thrice Upon a Time is so bewilderingly maximalist in its ambitions, so conflicted in its heart, so dense and idiosyncratic from its title on down that it’s hard to know where to even begin gauging one’s own reaction to it except by probing inward.

Many Saints comes bursting out of the proverbial shed with so many new ideas that one gets the sense it easily could—perhaps should—have been a new season of television.

Blomkamp, one suspects, does not possess the same imagination for interior worlds he’s exhibited for external. Demonic largely proves this thesis correct.

In a rare moment of open self-criticism, Gorbachev ponders that he was perhaps “too soft” on those traitorous countrymen who rallied to unseat him; that he ought to have had them “sent away.” It’s the lone sobering, tantalizing, self-aware peek into the savage realpolitik lurking beneath his noble words.

This is Imaishi’s world. Every cut, gesture, and line of dialogue here is punctuated by maximum comic book-style exclamation points. Every spectacular action feat is escalated several different times over the top, crossing from coolness through self-parody and back to coolness in a way that’s bound to make the attention-deficient among us stand up and cheer.

Though not a film as big or bombastic as North Korea’s political gestures, nor one to ruminate on larger questions about the political state of East Asia’s former Third World and the Western observer’s role to bear, White’s picture pokes its head above the masses of drably shot, dryly informational documentaries currently dominating streaming services with both its clear and concise journalism and its deft command of narrative and genre.

Action sequences are choreographed and edited with a degree of tight conceptual and spatial coherency that puts nearly any Marvel movie to shame, whether close-quarters scuffles or epic woman-on-kaiju confrontations.

The Holocaust is one of the most exhaustively documented events in history, yet it can seemingly never be documented enough. This is not only due to the relentless persistence of antisemites and fascist sympathizers in trying to sow doubt as to its veracity, but because many more seemingly benign parties have managed to distance themselves from fascism’s warning to the West, and the world.

It’s a familiar traced sketch of 20th century imagined dystopias, but Gen-Z trappings evocative of our own looming dystopia offer a slightly new shade of color. It just isn’t vivid enough.

Hit or miss as it may be, Borat 2 at least doesn’t fall short on sheer audacious vulgarity.

Having come upon a provocative allegory for the endemic dissociation of the hyper-digital age, though, Nikou does not interrogate it as intensely or from as many angles as possible in the lean, character-driven 90-minute film.

A timely but confusing mess of styles, tones, and subject matter.

What it lacks in formal finesse or educational scope, the film more than compensates as a taut illustration of the profound disconnect between high-level social engineering and the lived social realities that totalitarian policies entail. It’s quiet, feminist rage against Big Brother.