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A-
|
Toxic
(2024)
|
Rory O'Connor
|
Little of this is for the faint of heart, but Bliuvaitė’s refusal to relish in her protagonists’ misfortunes or bury them in misery gives Toxic a compelling and rebellious energy.
Posted Nov 06, 2024
|
|
C
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September 5
(2024)
|
Lucia Ahrensdorf
|
Here, humanity is condensed and trapped in professional gestures––a bloodless upholding of American corporate-media machinations.
Posted Nov 05, 2024
|
|
A-
|
Vermiglio
(2024)
|
Lucia Ahrensdorf
|
Delpero masterfully captures the characters’ experiences and psychology through gesture, performance, and framing rather than dialogue. Krichman’s cinematography, perhaps the best of the year, invokes painting and theater.
Posted Nov 05, 2024
|
|
C+
|
Paddington in Peru
(2024)
|
Alistair Ryder
|
It’s clearly a disappointment compared to the two King-directed efforts, but is not without moments of comic inspiration, enjoyable supporting performances, and well-engineered adventure blockbuster set pieces.
Posted Nov 04, 2024
|
|
A-
|
Drowning Dry
(2024)
|
Rory O'Connor
|
Bareiša’s sophomore feature is wrestling with the weightiest topics imaginable, but this is a director who knows when to come up for air.
Posted Nov 03, 2024
|
|
B+
|
Soundtrack to a Coup d'État
(2024)
|
John Fink
|
Made by a Belgian filmmaker / artist, the film is a deep examination of the sins of his county’s past and their complicity in defaulting to the superpowers of the day.
Posted Oct 31, 2024
|
|
A-
|
Juror #2
(2024)
|
Caleb Hammond
|
Juror #2 stands out as the best late-career Eastwood film, from an era with its fair share of gems.
Posted Oct 31, 2024
|
|
B
|
The Graduates
(2023)
|
Dan Mecca
|
The most important, effective, and unsettling element of this film is the normalcy of it all.
Posted Oct 30, 2024
|
|
C-
|
Here
(2024)
|
Caleb Hammond
|
Here carries [a] sense of dolls being arranged in a dollhouse.
Posted Oct 29, 2024
|
|
B
|
My Favourite Cake
(2024)
|
Rory O'Connor
|
Travel bans notwithstanding, My Favourite Cake’s most effective transgression is allowing its elderly characters to be horny. That’s a topic you likely won’t find in another Iranian film this year. Just don’t go in expecting much provocation.
Posted Oct 23, 2024
|
|
A-
|
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
(2024)
|
Michael Frank
|
Nyoni’s film becomes a mixture of rage and tackling of Zambian burial rites, a clear-eyed look at the impossibility of these situations for the abused, the affected, the broken.
Posted Oct 22, 2024
|
|
B+
|
Morning Glory
(2010)
|
Dan Mecca
|
McKenna and Michell seem to believe you can have fun without being patronized in the movie theater. And while their film isn’t a home run in the dwindling sub-genre of intelligent rom-coms, it’s a solid double.
Posted Oct 21, 2024
|
|
C
|
The Summer Book
(2024)
|
Oliver Weir
|
The Summer Book, is based entirely on what we might call “scenic exhalation”: those moments of repose in which a character stares at a landscape while the cogs of reflection work away, revealing at last the bittersweet unity of all things.
Posted Oct 21, 2024
|
|
B
|
The Line
(2023)
|
Dan Mecca
|
The Line is hard to watch, and the banality of this kind of evil is incredibly off-putting. Horrible things happen while people are laughing. Even while The Line extends its welcome, it’s an undeniably unnerving experience.
Posted Oct 18, 2024
|
|
B-
|
Suburban Fury
(2024)
|
Jake Kring-Schreifels
|
A formally audacious and perplexing portrait of Moore that contextualizes her extremist actions within one of the most transformative periods in American history.
Posted Oct 18, 2024
|
|
B+
|
My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow
(2024)
|
Luke Hicks
|
Through Loktev’s run-and-gun immersion in their world, we begin to understand how the groundwork is laid to propagandize and miseducate the masses, a huge swath of whom see straight through it.
Posted Oct 17, 2024
|
|
C
|
Eat the Night
(2024)
|
Alistair Ryder
|
Eat the Night is three films unsatisfactorily blended into one; the only one to make any impact is that for which these filmmakers squandered all potential.
Posted Oct 14, 2024
|
|
C+
|
TWST - Things We Said Today
(2024)
|
Michael Frank
|
With the Beatles still reverberating through collective culture, TWST / Things We Said Today contains enough of their power to sustain this film’s entirety.
Posted Oct 14, 2024
|
|
B
|
All of You
(2024)
|
Alistair Ryder
|
a richer, more grown-up screen romance than any I’ve seen recently––Goldstein and Bridges didn’t need any sci-fi hook to offer a fresh take on an oversaturated genre.
Posted Oct 10, 2024
|
|
B
|
Blitz
(2024)
|
Alistair Ryder
|
There’s a stronger film inside Blitz that acts as a far more excoriating corrective to this nostalgic reimagining of an infamously dark period for the country––McQueen just can’t find a way to make that palatable through his young protagonist’s eyes.
Posted Oct 09, 2024
|
|
B
|
The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire
(2024)
|
David Katz
|
The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire aims to foreground its primary literary material and historical context, but instead directs more attention to its oneiric touches and environmental phenomena––the “wind in the trees,” so to speak.
Posted Oct 09, 2024
|
|
B+
|
Viet and Nam
(2024)
|
Luke Hicks
|
Minh Quý’s slow-cinema sensibilities are nothing short of spellbinding, the trance of rumination within reason enough to seek it out.
Posted Oct 07, 2024
|
|
A
|
Nickel Boys
(2024)
|
Jourdain Searles
|
There are few American films that come close to what it accomplishes, as either film or adaptation. Nickel Boys suggests a miracle, with the makings of a classic.
Posted Oct 04, 2024
|
|
B-
|
The Friend
(2024)
|
Michael Frank
|
It’s the type of film my parents would love––something shown on a cable network on a Sunday afternoon, easy to watch with just enough substance to make the audience feel something reminiscent of sadness. That’s a compliment, though.
Posted Oct 04, 2024
|
|
B+
|
Afternoons of Solitude
(2024)
|
David Katz
|
We’re very sensitized to the constructed and artificial nature of documentary now, but Serra’s prime achievement here is to achieve an objectivity of perspective.
Posted Oct 02, 2024
|
|
B
|
Notice to Quit
(2024)
|
Dan Mecca
|
The city has swallowed Andy whole, but he can still do right by his daughter. For such a small, simple film, this is quite powerful.
Posted Sep 24, 2024
|
|
B-
|
Ick
(2024)
|
C.J. Prince
|
A riotous take on the creature feature and a scathing satire of society’s apathetic attitude in the face of existential threats.
Posted Sep 12, 2024
|
|
C-
|
Nutcrackers
(2024)
|
Soham Gadre
|
Green throws his characters together: rather than giving them depth, they come across as ciphers for a predictable journey that hits all-too-familiar notes.
Posted Sep 12, 2024
|
|
B
|
Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 2
(2024)
|
Savina Petkova
|
While the first part was packed with more action and edited in a more belligerent way, this one allows a slowing-down of pace (only a little) so we can get to know those characters better.
Posted Sep 12, 2024
|
|
C-
|
Saturday Night
(2024)
|
Ethan Vestby
|
While this may be a ’70s period piece (complete with era-replicating sheen) the climax where we’re supposed to cheer on a producer getting corporate acceptance points to a work as subtly evil as the ’80s ideology of his dad’s Reaganite comedies.
Posted Sep 11, 2024
|
|
B
|
The Quiet Ones
(2024)
|
Jared Mobarak
|
August’s script deserves much credit––a lot needs to be made known during preparations for what occurs to make sense. That none of it feels forced is no small feat.
Posted Sep 11, 2024
|
|
B
|
Friendship
(2024)
|
Christopher Schobert
|
A hysterically funny, pitch-black comedy.
Posted Sep 11, 2024
|
|
A-
|
The Story of Souleymane
(2024)
|
Rory O'Connor
|
It was, for my money, the best discovery of this year’s Cannes Film Festival and, somewhat ironically, exactly the kind of work that used to define it.
Posted Sep 10, 2024
|
|
B
|
Flow
(2024)
|
Ethan Vestby
|
If able to recognize the canny bit of emotional manipulation, all the same I must appreciate it still getting me through every nerve-wracking setpiece with a deep level of investment.
Posted Sep 10, 2024
|
|
B
|
Relay
(2024)
|
Jared Mobarak
|
The suspense that ensues is highly effective, despite it mostly being scenes with different relay operatives speaking aloud what Tom types as Sarah listens.
Posted Sep 10, 2024
|
|
C
|
2073
(2024)
|
Luke Hicks
|
The preachy tone betrays the film, giving it a seedy, conspiratorial feel when there is nothing conspiratorial about it all––just plain, simple, broad, and necessary economic and political facts.
Posted Sep 10, 2024
|
|
B-
|
Conclave
(2024)
|
Caleb Hammond
|
More airport paperback than theological treatise, Conclave is undeniably silly throughout, but its last-second reveals choreograph the sensibility too openly, undercutting much of what was masterfully unfurled up until that point.
Posted Sep 10, 2024
|
|
B
|
Heretic
(2024)
|
Jared Mobarak
|
It’s a helluva ride through the annals of religious history and the ways in which the concept of God has been bought and sold by charlatans and pop culture.
Posted Sep 10, 2024
|
|
B
|
Happyend
(2024)
|
Savina Petkova
|
Its propulsion and vivacity comes from the ensemble cast of capable youngsters and is further amplified by a phenomenal score from Brooklyn-based composer Lia Ouyang Rusli.
Posted Sep 10, 2024
|
|
B-
|
The Assessment
(2024)
|
Jared Mobarak
|
The tone can get too jokey for its own good regarding subject matter, but I didn’t necessarily hate it. That’s what happens when the utopia you thought you helped build reveals itself to be a dystopian hellscape devoid of freedom.
Posted Sep 10, 2024
|
|
C-
|
The Return
(2024)
|
Ethan Vestby
|
Not giving off the sense of a visual filmmaker, Pasolini isn’t quite able to tell his story through these bodies, though––a talky affair where dull power dynamics to take the crown hold precedence over everything else
Posted Sep 09, 2024
|
|
C
|
Nightbitch
(2024)
|
C.J. Prince
|
It’s the last third of Nightbitch where the film goes from mostly harmless to embarrassing.
Posted Sep 08, 2024
|
|
C+
|
Eden
(2024)
|
Christopher Schobert
|
Eden wants to leave the audience brimming with respect for the survival skills of Floreana’s inhabitants. Unfortunately, the endless scenes of discord are what will be remembered.
Posted Sep 08, 2024
|
|
B-
|
On Swift Horses
(2024)
|
Christopher Schobert
|
Minahan and Klass struggle to balance the film’s many characters and disparate storylines, but at the same time they’ve created a film populated by people who are wildly compelling.
Posted Sep 08, 2024
|
|
B
|
The Fire Inside
(2024)
|
Jared Mobarak
|
In the end, THE FIRE INSIDE is a sports biography with all the trappings you'd expect. It's a solid debut for Morrison and a star-making turn for Destiny with a message for girls and boys to know their worth and never settle.
Posted Sep 08, 2024
|
|
B+
|
We Live in Time
(2024)
|
Jared Mobarak
|
Garfield and Pugh are adorable in their capacity to shed all pretense of celebrity and embody an everyman vibe ruled by desire.
Posted Sep 08, 2024
|
|
A-
|
The End
(2024)
|
Caleb Hammond
|
While [recent eat the rich satires] function as empty calories, a way for audience laughter to act as an absolution of responsibility, The End seeks to probe something deeper: to examine the evil in all man, then offer up hope and a path for redemption
Posted Sep 07, 2024
|
|
A-
|
April
(2024)
|
Savina Petkova
|
It confirms Kulumbegashvili as an assured visionary unafraid to engage with ambivalence and radical opacity. In other words: a different brand of storyteller.
Posted Sep 07, 2024
|
|
B
|
Daniela Forever
(2024)
|
Jared Mobarak
|
Let the emotions of the moment take over your logical desire to pick apart any shortcomings that exist.
Posted Sep 07, 2024
|
|
B
|
Broken Rage
(2024)
|
Leonardo Goi
|
locking in at 62 minutes, Broken Rage is not a simple divertissement, but a rollicking self-portrait: an artist rethinking his relationship with the medium he’s mastered and having a decidedly grand time in the process.
Posted Sep 07, 2024
|
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