Matt Cipolla

As a whodunnit it largely works, save one aspect easy to spot miles away. Stakes-wise it’s high, even if it pulls its punches once or twice on who bites the bullet. As a return to form for Scream, this is a sigh of relief––notwithstanding some key issues VI has a freewheeling sense of lunacy, and it’s way too fun to decry.

Feste’s script does nothing to establish its world. While first appearing to be tethered to reality, Run Sweetheart Run soon recontextualizes itself as supernatural without telegraphing or even justifying its decisions.

It wants to be something cute for the family. It also wants to show how belligerent and vulgar young teenagers can be. The problem is that the two never intersect, and it’s jarring, to say the least.

This one sure is a challenge. Lots of that has to do with how the movie’s successes only become apparent after the fact. Its structure is its story, and it folds in on itself as much as it stacks its pieces on top of one another

Scream is not a bad movie. It is, however, a case of mediocrity being the worst sin. For a franchise all about coping with a media landscape that begets disillusionment to produce something just like this, it especially hurts.

Despite the reasons House of Gucci doesn’t work, none are damning enough to make a bad movie. It’s forgettable, sometimes playing like the sort of cable-TV fare that displaced these tales from the silver screen over the past decade. Yet Scott’s efforts, and especially those of Johnson and Bentivegna, just don’t keep up. And what’s the point of going big if you’re not going to go for it all?

Every kill on display here is to someone superfluous, immediately forgettable, or both. The special effects are decent at points, but at what cost? To bridge the gap to next year’s final entry? There’s just no impact here.

It’s obvious that Young wanted to make something unique. Hopefully she strikes a chord in the future, but The Blazing World is just patchwork.

Karia hasn’t made a deep film or even a particularly unique one, but he’s made one that has enough to get by. It’s not just good—it’s good enough.

With Days, Tsai turns the audience into the lonely and makes them see the world from the inside out.

It’s a very well done documentary on a technical level, and those qualities make it quite energizing at times. It’s the pace that truncates some of the details, making Homeroom too brisk to realize all of its moving parts.

There’s often a lack of narrative purpose, and refreshingly so. It follows whatever catches its eye. It, much like Bourdain, is zealous in collecting the excess of surrounding information.

Textually, problems emerge from the myriad supporting characters, virtually all of whom play like narrative props. The script seems uninterested in its conflict; the filmmaking lacks the style to glue its pieces together.

The final result is about as much of a time-passer one could make with this script and what must have been a small budget.

While von Horn’s script has trouble fitting its themes and plot together, Magdalena Koleśnik’s performance commands the good and the bad.

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair isn’t an exposé on internet culture or social media. Nothing about it is shocking, nor is it meant to be. That’s why it feels so real when it reaches its natural conclusion.

As a fully-fledged statement, El Planeta wavers about as much as it succeeds. As observational comedy with a bit of bite, it signals good things for Amalia Ulman as a filmmaker.

Dear Comrades! is—to throw an overused word around—timely, but largely in how it observes the conflict between communism and socialism and how modern audiences confuse the two.

If anything, Fireball works best as a personification of its own themes. The textbook feeds the truncated, the truncated the tactile. Its own interests and understandings don’t always seem to exist on the same plane, but perhaps that’s okay. They’re still shining. They’ll sort themselves out eventually.

It’s dissonant, often hypnotic filmmaking. It’s also rote for stretches, with Petzold’s narrative approach surprisingly straightforward enough to make it just decent overall.

Finding Yingying doesn’t plumb the differences between U.S. and Chinese relations as much as the story alludes to, but the sheer emotion of it all largely redeems it.

For a look at the life of John Belushi, it’s a fittingly brisk one. For a dive into his career, it’s one that, despite a general lack of originality, mines a few solid points.

Msangi pulls off something most filmmakers don’t: She adapts her own short film to a feature without stretching it out.

It’s about the many forms of privilege and the intersecting failures they result in. Most of all, it’s about how this United States, this oh so great country of God, can’t understand the difference between liberty and entitlement.

The Wolf of Snow Hollow aims more to be about its small village, but in reality, it’s more about how frayed police officers, especially men, abuse their privileges. It’d be a great vehicle to skewer these topics if the pieces fit together, but they don’t.

Sorkin doesn’t face these evils for more than a moment at a time. He doesn’t even try to convert the uninitiated, but his movie thinks it does. His script and direction gaze rather than observe, and by the time the score swells and the requisite title cards inform the viewer of its leads’ fates, The Trial of the Chicago 7 has brought virtually nothing to light.

A collage of distant memories and the realities that threaten them, Residue is an auspicious calling card for its filmmaker.

Coup 53 isn’t the most coherent in approach or pacing, but its ambition––and overall literacy––ties its knots.