Slant Magazine

This chronicle of a self-absorbed teenager learning to step outside his own world may be familiar in its broad outlines, but Fernando Eimbcke’s maturity and lack of judgment imbues it with a warmth that makes it feel fresh.

Eli Roth aims for social commentary in the homestretch, but if the moment doesn’t feel satisfyingly nihilistic, that’s because his stab at building out the story has all the consistency of soft serve.

As a follow-up to his 2022 cult freak-out The Outwaters, writer-director Robbie Banfitch’s Tinsman Road couldn’t be more impressively different.

The film is more interested in the passions that kept Anthony Boudrain's demons at bay than in how those demons ultimately consumed him.

For the first time in his current screen iteration, Spider-Man seems like what he is in the comics: the beating heart of Marvel and its most compelling figure.

Similar to Inland Empire, Refn’s film whirlwinds its way to an alternately funny and frightening confrontation with an evil incarnate that, once vanquished, allows for a mystical connection of lonely souls, a divine purge of long-held trauma, and an ambiguous way forward for those who remain.

Potsy Ponciroli’s Motor City feels like a lost B-movie from a bygone era, channeling the spirit of the vigilante films and other exploitation genres of the 1970s.

Colony stops just short of capturing the gleefully sustained and heightened sense of suspense that made Train to Busan so electrifying.

Kore-eda Hirokazu is most committed to a New Age-y transcendence that finds its fullest expression in a mawkish finale.

The Odyssey is both faithful and deconstructive, embodying the fluidity of the oral tradition that spawned the poem and kept it alive for millennia through shifting tastes and values.