Pat Brown

The past comes off in Mascha Schilinski’s film as an onerous, if unseen, weight on the present.

The past comes off in Mascha Schilinski’s film as an onerous, if unseen, weight on the present.

There’s a self-reflexivity to the game’s artifact-y textures that’s lost in this film adaptation, where the finely detailed look of just about everything says nothing in itself about the endless possibilities of a digital world’s malleability.

While the film features a strong performance from Judy Greer, it’s essentially a patchwork of broad strokes that rarely feel like they’re bringing its world to credible life.

While Hannah Peterson, with her emphasis on quiet moments and mementos mori, effectively suffuses The Graduates with a mournful absence of life, she also reminds us of the warmth that can be so typical of high school.

With exceptional lucidity, No Other Land reminds us of the human stakes of Israel’s resettlement of the West Bank, and that fighting for justice starts from the ground up.

Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala depict Agnes’s plight with empathy but with a horror maven’s sense of ratcheting unease and encroaching doom.

Mati Diop’s captivating, fabulistic documentary Dahomey confronts the reality of how modernity has been shaped by the West’s theft of cultural heritage.

Spaceman seems to want to be an allegory about men’s emotional unavailability and its impact on heterosexual relationships, but instead of coming across universal, the film’s human characters, along with much of the drama, are mostly empty space.

What we’re confronted with in the film may be less the quaint idiocy of four dull simians and more our own inability to loosen up and just live.