Sarah-Tai Black

While there’s something admirable about Girls Like Girls and its refusal to tidy up the mess of queer adolescence (the film will no doubt be an instant classic for young sapphics), it unfortunately never deepens into something fully realized. It only gestures toward the feeling and atmosphere of emotional complexity, rather than materializing its substance in full.

While a thrilling watch at many moments, there is also an overwhelming sense that politics and characters of I Love Boosters are struggling to find their full expression against the weight of the film’s undeniably spirited ambition.

What remains is an interesting, if too often overly protracted, portrait of creative frustration, artistic ego and the ethics of storytelling in an overly saturated landscape. It’s Shackleton’s most personal film to date, even though it’s about something that doesn’t exist. Or maybe that’s why it feels personal – here he is finally interrogating not just formal convention, but his own desire to fit into it.

While the original Now You See Me had a winking audacity that leaned into the absurdity of its bag of tricks, the newest installment feels rote and lacks the thrill of genuine surprise.

While HIM’s visual and cinematographic landscapes might be stylistically evocative at times, they lack in narrative substance and a discerning formal logic, reducing images and themes rife with narrative potential into a series of hollowly aestheticized surfaces that squander the film’s own potential as well as the talent of its actors.

Honey Don’t! attempts another go at a mock, low-brow outing reimagined through a queer lens, but suffers irrevocably from an uncompelling mystery, patterned by a series of gags that leads nowhere.

Much like its predecessors, Bloodlines joyfully relishes in its Rube Goldbergian kills and thrills, often trading on the absurd humour of its own fashioning.

Unfortunately, Opus isn’t able to keep up the tension of its cult-horror mystery, speeding through its reveals with a surprising laziness that feels counter to the care it initially took in building out its story.

Diop’s latest documentary film is a poetic witnessing of the contradictions, mediations and politics of cultural restitution.

It’s a shallow and soulless outing that has no faith in the intelligence of its audience, squanders the considerable skills of its lead actresses, and, in its shallow and inert politics, is pathologically audacious in the worst sense.