Gary Garrison

Above all, Tigerland pays respects to that awe-inspiring creature at its core.

While Lagoze’s film may not offer any genuinely new insights, it is an unsettling opportunity to bear witness to the numbing chaos of war.

The intimacy that Herbert attains with the kids and the respect that she affords them prevents the film from ever seeming exploitative of their lives and hardships and rather gives it a thorough sense of empathy.

Wang’s film is intimate, thought-provoking and well-crafted. It condemns the horrors of the policy without condemning those who were brainwashed into being its vessels, and it gives voice to so many families whose agency was stolen from them.

In being such a simple, unshowy film, it avoids asking too many questions or digging for the larger truths writ large in the story of Fyre about our society, about celebrity and influencers and Instagram, and the patently manufactured lives that we’re taught to believe we can have.

Despite its tendency to lean upon self-serious reimaginings, it is nonetheless an engaging and tenderly drawn film that is likely to resonate with anyone who has had to do the tireless work of sorting through an estate of a family member.

It aims for simplicity, for a celebration of his unrivaled talents, and often fails to explore the complexity of the very man at its center.

Age of Rage doesn’t ever chart any new ground. It settles with serving as yet another incendiary portrait of hate in this time of division.

This Is Congo is not an easy documentary to watch. And anyone who knows anything about the tumultuous, war-torn country would understand that from the get-go. Still, despite expectations, it is an engaging, if unsettling, film.

They are tough and necessary questions that make Take Your Pills, for all its dizzying energy, a grounded and rigorous film. Though at times, it feels too squeamish to lean all the way into an idea or too hard on a particular truth, which makes it feel too deliberate and maybe not quite the earnest dissection it could be.

The primary reason that Along For The Ride is not the seminal film of the life of the late, great Dennis Hopper, is that the doc is, ostensibly, the story of Satya de la Manitou, Hopper’s life-long friend and right-hand man.

What is, at its outset, a rather charming film about the world-famous card mechanic Richard Turner and the obstacles he has overcome, winds up being a searching study of the painful nature of coming to terms with your own vulnerabilities.

Wingard’s film is an incoherent mess of tones and styles, confused character motives, and murky narratives.

It’s a chilling, assured debut for writer/director Power, packed with promise and a startlingly mundane sort of violence which is all the more shocking for its realism.

For all the tepid pacing and uneven storytelling, though, Collins and co. do a great job of making To The Bone a watchable film. They are, by turns, charming and heartbreaking — even when they aren’t given much to do by the script.

While the film lavishes in the beautiful landscape and the vibrant, eclectic music that abounds, it never coalesces into anything greater than the sum of its parts, or become the film the subject deserves.

A film that, while not especially pronounced in its structure or technical achievements, is nonetheless timely and devastating.

It certainly succeeds in being a joyous, humane look at the role that school, education, and, most importantly, teachers have in the lives of such malleable minds.

Donald Cried is a film of small moments (that is almost marred by an explosive one) and it seems intent to linger in wistfulness, in the sort of hushed sadness that never becomes a fever pitch, but is all the better for it.

Ocean Waves is a deeply charming and resonant look at the tug of longing that so often comes with memory, the utter mess of youth, and the beautiful delirium of love.

It knows of its B-movie roots, its tired plot and well-worn archetypes, and beneath the burden of the sorely unoriginal, it does manage to be occasionally funny, occasionally surprising, and occasionally the bloody and bombastic genre cliche it set out to be.

The critical failure of 37 — because certainly a film is allowed to have disdain for its characters; there is no law that art must care for its subjects — is the fundamental lack of narrative, or even of tension.

It’s hard to resist the joy of the film, the unbridled heart, and Ove’s tremendous, hilarious hatred for all the idiots of the world.

For all the moments of visual flair and earnest fun, it’s a film so indebted to Anderson (among obvious others) that it never manages to become something of its own.

More than anything else the film becomes a celebration of these two lives and the era of music that both created and destroyed them.

Too often the mechanisms of plot can be felt, the beats of the story seen, and the obvious intentions of the story heard in a line of dialogue. So, while at times it’s easy to see the great film that Tunnel could have been, that never stops it from being perfectly watchable thriller that it is.

Imperium, at its best, is a film about the ideological crisis of seeing the principles your worldview is built upon repurposed for hate and bigotry. But once it reaches these highs, the third act mostly squanders them.

From a purely objective standpoint, the film’s pacing sags at times, and its energy deflates, as is so often the case in trying to turn a chronological story into a cohesive narrative. But above all, Steve’s spirit soars.