IONCINEMA.com

If you tell a joke and it doesn’t land, telling it even louder won’t make it funnier. It’s a bit of advice that sibling filmmakers David and Nathan Zellner might want to heed following Alpha Gang. Their latest is an overlong and overloud one gag movie that leaves a game, all-star cast looking for the punchline.

Saddled with numerous montage sequences, one gets the feeling that even Pechman struggled with what quite to say about the world of literary journals, if they matter, or how their influence and stature has changed in fifteen years. In fact, we’re never really quite sure why Nora wants to work at Platen in the first place, other than its supposed sterling reputation.

The Debut, led by a full-tilt performance by Julianne Moore, can never quite decide if it’s on the side of its daydreamers or mocking them from afar.

As far as elegantly stylized horror films go, Strippoli hits a home run with a rueful and devilish metaphorical homily.

It’s something of a miracle that the film doesn’t spiral out of the control, but Tariq, aided by an impressively stoic turn by Ali, has a firm hand on his vision.

Company quickly outwears its welcome, existing in a vacuum where its human characters are boring nonentities, merely grist for the mill on a conveyor belt racing to unleash both the essence of melancholy and agony, neither of which Affleck properly distinguishes.

Carla’s genuine reactions are what make A Good Little Soldier so relatable because of the inherent code switching that occurs between the different realms most of us traverse.

Like an obligatory offering of tiramisu in many an Italian restaurant, It Will Happen Tonight is a chalky, sugary concoction that tastes nice enough but suffers from staleness.

It’s wearying to behold, troubling to gaze upon, and supremely satisfying as an artifact of an experimental artistic endeavor which could never be repeated.

Woman Unknown is a film which depends almost entirely on the success of a lead performance, and Mathilde Arcel’s mounting terror at being discovered is formidably tense, her compartmentalized identities slicing into one another for the creation of psychological wounds it’s unlikely she’ll ever truly recover from.