Jordan Hoffman

Though Nicholas Hoult is charming as he struggles to find inner strength, Renfield lives or dies by Nic Cage camping it up. And he delivers.

The movie starts with the volume cranked to 10, then never takes a breath. At three hours it is unbearable. Yes, this is meant to be a “bad trip” of a movie, taking you inside the experience of someone undergoing a crisis, but there’s a limit. And then it’s revealed that this grown man has mommy issues. For that you made me sit through all this noise?

The entire picture exudes the wide-eyed (some might say immature) wonderment found around slobbering beasts and magic spells. No, you absolutely do not need to know a thing about D&D to like this. But if you have a familiarity with the Forgotten Realms, the 1980s D&D cartoon show, or if you’re just a Led Zeppelin fan, there’s something here for you. Otherwise, there’s too much going on to ever feel left out.

And while it is enjoyable and has many great moments, it doesn’t quite come together with polish.

For his third feature, Cronenberg the Younger doesn’t ape his father’s style so much as he expands upon it. With Infinity Pool, in comparison to Cronenberg the Elder’s good-but-not-great Crimes Of The Future, you could even say he’s perfecting it.

If you buy a ticket for this one, just know there’s no First Class option. But with moderate expectations, you’ll still get to your destination.

While witnessing the physical act of love on screen can sometimes transcend into something with great depth, this is, sorry to say, not one of those cases. It’s just a lot of huffing and puffing.

It is extremely clever and deeply moving, and winningly gets at the essence of Goldin’s current and past work, without straining too hard to ape her style.

You don’t need to be a fan of the accordion-toting Yankovic to get some enjoyment and laughs out of the gleefully absurd Weird, but it sure wouldn’t hurt either.

It asks more questions than it answers, and doesn’t let anybody off the hook. It’s also a great movie for anyone who grew up in New York City area in 1980, with the right needle drops and art direction. This is James Gray’s eighth feature and, in the end, his simplest. It may also be his best.

It’s as if everyone made this movie about the joy of being on vacation—while also taking one.

It’s just so embarrassingly thin. The few chuckles are all the more depressing when you realize that this could have been a winner with a clever screenwriter and a competent director.

At the halfway mark, a little spice gets shaken into the otherwise thin soup. It’s still far from a must-see, but there are rewards for those who stick to the end.

Amsterdam is not a great movie by any shakes, although it looks terrific and all of the performances . . . are energetic, entertaining, and enjoyable.

There aren’t any clever moments, just a parade of clichés you’ve seen in many other indie romances.

Prince-Bythewood, whose Beyond The Lights is one of the most overlooked movies of the last decade, has created a vision of historical Africa that has truly never been seen in a mainstream American movie. For that alone, she deserves a crown.

If there’s a message at all in Moonage Daydream, it is secondary to the experiential nature of the movie. That’s hardly a knock. One goes to a concert to be thrilled, not necessarily to gather life lessons. Leave that sort of thing for the other, lesser documentaries.

The first feature from Owen Kline, Funny Pages is not a dramatic masterpiece, but its setting, tone, look, feel, and casting would send real comic book geeks off doing cartwheels—if only we possessed the coordination. Instead, it will have to suffice to sit there, mouths open with the typical drool, thinking “I feel seen.”

The imagery runs backward and forward, gets freeze-framed, goes through different filters, and is blown up, reduced, diced, and re-assembled like playing cards. But director Bianca Stigter fully commits to this formalist dare—and it pays off tremendously.

Even on the couch, with the ability to hit pause, it reaches heights (ha!) of quintessential B-movie greatness, causing exactly the kind of discomfort that elicits verbal rebukes.

Movies like Resurrection are terrific because they blur the line between how you’d act in reality and what’s appropriate for a film.

Watching Sharp Stick is like encountering that pain box that Paul Atreides faces in Dune, only instead of a hand it’s your entire soul. Every moment is awkward, phony, excruciating, and just so unbelievably bad.

It’s the film’s mercurial nature, its hazy dreamlike logic, that makes it so extraordinary.

The look (and sound) of Murina are mesmerizing.

This movie is not particularly good. One seizes upon highlights from the sideline when what’s happening front and center is just so dull.

Flux Gourmet is very much a “not for everyone” type of movie, but even people unwilling or unable to connect with it must recognize that it isn’t simply weird for weirdnesses sake. Beyond the obvious theme of the artist’s eternal struggle with those who offer patronage only to start shortening the leash, there’s a frank look at just how strange it is for people to come together to make art in the first place.

There’s little about it that is realistic, but it has points to make about the real world.

There’s nothing about this film that is uplifting, but Davies’ handling of the material is so exquisite that the overbearing melancholy becomes, in the end, a work of poetry.