Brandon Yu

This Netflix thriller is a fun-enough time that is elevated by the performances of predator and prey.

Although Charli and Góra can’t quite translate enough layers between them to make this film really bruise, this is a pleasantly slight work that doesn’t overstay its welcome.

A slapdash satire of modern celebrity culture that is awkward where it wants to be acerbic and clumsily maudlin where it wants to be meaningful.

This is, in short, as polished as you would expect of a work about a pop behemoth, a companion piece to their new album that’s less a revelatory look at the meaning of their time away than a sentimental welcome back for the group and its fans. For the BTS Army, that’s likely more than enough.

It is no fun for a viewer to scoff at a film that purports to speak to pain that is real for many. But “Slanted” doesn’t actually have any interest in contending with those experiences seriously, instead using its palely observed traumas as a launchpad for a pastiche of other punchier genre films.

It has its momentary charms, mostly when it’s just .Paak and Rasheed riffing off each other, with the buoyant chemistry of a real father and son, or, when we see .Paak be less BJ under K-pop’s bright lights and more himself, just the artist with a mic and a set of drums.

The knight might represent the contagion of human evil, and Anne’s story a journey of proto-feminism, but for all its big themes, the most resonant is the film’s title.

It’s a story with few surprises and mostly rudimentary emotional concepts, but is enlivened by artwork with colorful texture and a dynamic animation style.

Even as it periodically languishes, the film comes back around, with some moving flourishes, to stamp its idea: To witness these vicissitudes over a lifetime, is to see the beauty, bloodshed and loneliness of true artistic greatness.

Damon is the only one keeping his head above water, mostly because he’s the only one given the space to make decisions and navigate different dynamics. Everyone else is trapped in a kiddie game of cops and robbers.