Steven Scaife

Keating’s film forgets the cardinal rule of good pastiche: that if you’re not building something new from familiar pieces then you’re just regurgitating old ideas.

Throughout, Josephine Decker effortlessly keys her intimate and eccentric style to her main character’s complicated inner turmoil.

The film provides no space to explore its relationships, and as a result there’s little friction to the climax.

After a while, writer-director Iuli Gerbase’s boldly mundane take on forced isolation gives way to a regular sort of mundanity.

The film is a thoughtful examination of the human desire for it and the accompanying hope that it may exorcise the emptiness we feel.

The film capsizes in the absence of a compelling center for Mélanie Laurent to hang her directorial panache.

We Need to Do Something mainly succeeds at suggesting a more compelling film beyond its bathroom walls.

The film has the knowing swagger of something on the cutting edge but none of the self-awareness to realize it’s late to the party.

Travis Stevens’s film is psychologically astute, until it gives itself over to turning subtext into extremely legible text.

Violation impressively pushes against the typically straightforward trajectory of the rape-revenge film.

The film’s characters hardly possess a sense of a history or an interior life to adequately convey racism’s psychic toll.

The problem with Earwig and the Witch has more to do with its confused plotting than its more or less serviceable animation.

The film is as much about the act of seeing and observing as it is about not seeing, about struggling to recognize that which might not clarify much at all.

Hunted intends to make a show of our desensitization to predator-prey relationships, but the greater purpose of its self-awareness never quite comes into clear focus.

Roseanne Liang leverages the absolute implausibility of the film’s later scenes into something brisk and exciting right to the very end.

Nicolas Cage’s amusing turn as a kooky hermit with an affinity for newspaper hats often feels awkwardly spliced into the film.

The film has an exciting, lived-in quality that elevates what are otherwise some markedly unsteady attempts at horror.

If Quirke’s film means to mimic the tunnel vision of its protagonist, it does so perhaps too effectively, losing its thematic potency as it travels on a predictable trajectory, involving spooky drawings and sisterly spats, all the while leaving the existential miasma sitting out of frame.

For all of its ostensible thoughtfulness, in trying to describe “real art,” Random Acts of Violence ultimately doesn’t describe anything at all.

The film is strikingly fixated on exploring loss and pain on an intimate and personal scale.

The film heralds the arrival a bold and formidable voice in horror cinema.

The film’s animation leans into its most jerky, artificial qualities, all the better to enhance the atmosphere of bizarre unreality.

Rather than a simplistic, straightforward parable of greed, Bad Education depicts its true events with a surprising amount of depth and ambiguity.

Through its exploration of Selah’s complexities, as well as the bravado and posturing that comes with being a credible drug dealer, Selah and the Spades locates a larger truth about the presentation of self and maintaining one’s image.

The film’s cat-and-mouse antics play out with no sense of escalation or invention.

It comes across like yet another casualty in the long line of stories about men having their eyes opened by their angelic girlfriends.

The film is at its weakest when it has to do drama, since the fallout of Mo and Zeke’s actions feels perfunctory and tossed-off in the rush to an ending, a hasty come-down after the proverbial party.

Writer-director Jason Lei Howden’s humor might have been tolerable if his film was at least reasonably imaginative.