Rodrigo Perez

There’s something fascinating about watching hackery attempt to transcend hackery, and for stretches, Verity achieves a strange sincerity of insincerity. But self-awareness isn’t intelligence, and intelligence isn’t craftsmanship. A movie can be deliciously over-the-top, trashy, campy, completely in on the joke, and still fail to deliver.

The film leaves us with the uneasy possibility that the story can end, the audience can applaud, and the iceberg will simply keep inching towards our collective doom.

The Life And Deaths Of Wilson Shedd is brutal, bruising, psychologically rich, and deeply moving—a prison drama about crime and punishment, but also loneliness, retribution, freedom, and the strange ways isolated people find one another. Nelson refuses easy moral arithmetic, leaving behind a film as unsettling in its compassion as it is uncompromising in its violence.

Gibney turns an attempted assassination into a moving portrait of rediscovery, resilience, and the difficult work of remaking a life of freedom after fear has tried, once again, to take it away.

The Zellners have turned an alien invasion into a celebration of humanity’s least efficient qualities and convinced an absurdly overqualified ensemble to play along. The result is a highly entertaining B-movie curiosity—playful, eccentric, unexpectedly sincere, and much more winning than something this cheerfully foolish probably has any right to be.

The concert footage explains why people still want to see Pulp perform, but the history scattered around it keeps suggesting a stronger film about why Pulp needed to return in the first place.

Once the franchise machinery fully takes over, he’s still directing the hell out of it and clearly having fun. Still, you’re left wishing he could have stayed in that stealthy slay mode longer—or made another original horror movie where nothing was standing between him and whatever strange idea he wanted to chase next.

McDonagh’s greatest instinct has always been his ability to regard deeply flawed characters with curiosity and compassion while refusing to let them off the hook. Here, that tension produces a bleak, laceratingly funny, and profoundly moving miniature tragedy about karma, friendship, and the stories people tell themselves to survive their own actions.

The movie remains silly, familiar, and ultimately lacking in substantial depth. Yet its charm resides in how readily it acknowledges those limitations and keeps moving. Mayday is an unabashed popcorn movie: brisk, escapist, cleverly staged, and more soulful than its thin setup suggests.

Gadot gets more abuse as an actress than she deserves, but starring in junk like this and failing to make even the junk convincing does her reputation no favors. Macdonald fares worse. Watching a filmmaker once capable of considerably smarter work throw cinematic adrenaline at an atrocious screenplay is almost embarrassing.