Rafaela Sales Ross

Bernal’s drama slash thriller slash comedy slash satire slash social critique has far too many slashes, caught in a web of its own making and slowly withering in its entrapment.

Greene excels at conducting this fast-paced carousel of weighty questions. Even more impressively, he finely balances the gravity of his empirical study of human connection with small moments of great tenderness.

Musk preserves a much-needed shock value, not just because of the concentration of horrors cued in quick succession and amplified by Pemberton’s anxiety-inducing music, but because of how clear a picture it forms of our near future—shaped by the ever-unstable, grubby hands of this one man.

While the great, victorious climax of Vasarhelyi and Chin’s shot-for-IMAX epic is drenched in weep-inducing emotion, the film sits in an uncomfortable, verging-on-hypocritical middle ground, oddly lacking self-awareness even as it believes it is built on it.

The Basics of Philosophy plays as a Schrader pastiche.

It feels natural to expect blood-dripping gore and reckless violence from a film titled Victorian Psycho, but, with his latest, Zachary Wigon chooses instead to lure the audience with the fresh smell of ripped flesh, only to trap them under a heavy blanket of frustration.

Despite not being top-shelf Almodóvar, it remains the work of a director long settled into form and, as such, offers its fair share of delights.

In disregarding the much more interesting machinations of the Resistance in favor of shrouding his protagonist in a thin cloak of importance, Nemes’ pompous drama ultimately loses sight of both the audience and its thesis, all while patting itself on its self-aggrandizing back.

Orphan feels like an exercise more concerned with the precision of its technical execution than the more ungovernable reins of its emotional axis.

It is a great disappointment that we had to wait a decade for the Danish director to return to filmmaking, only to wind up with something that much more resembles the drivel of Copenhagen Cowboy than the fresh panache of Drive.