David Robb

This is subject matter that might sound heavy, but the difficult feelings dredged up never overwhelm the film’s gentle, character-driven approach.

While Wolfram might struggle to convey a depth of feeling for its characters and the brutal, dehumanizing frontier they call home, it can be an intermittently satisfying good-versus-evil period piece.

Yellow Letters ultimately proves to be much less than the sum of its parts, as a lack of focus prevents its political commentary and humanist drama from cohering in any meaningful way.

Only cheap shock value can be gleaned from the film’s cavalcade of blood, semen, animal carcasses, dick pics, and erotic toothbrushing.

The film’s brisk pace does partly compensate for the essential banality of the central investigation.

Tessa Thompson's presence is captivating, as she relishes in exploring her character's gleeful and occasionally anxious villainy.

Though Hamnet is concerned with bottomless grief and the unique power of art to express the inexpressible, it can’t help but telegraph its themes loudly and incessantly, its emotional register off-puttingly monotonous.

The film’s mythologizing is refreshingly measured, and it offers an appealingly earnest take on the American story.

The possibility of relating to the characters is constantly hindered by the struggle to make sense of the story’s messily sketched dystopia.

There’s a low-key warmth to Romvari’s painstaking portrait of quotidian family life, as her documentarian attention to detail creates an intoxicatingly vivid rendering of 1990s suburbia.