The Playlist

La Ola is far from perfect, often losing sight of its broader ideas for less well-executed narrative beats that don’t always cohere, but it still finds a tune where it counts.

Unidentified ranks among a rare class of movies that forces viewers to re-interpret everything they’ve just seen once the full picture locks into place. Whether that makes everything that came before worthless or worth it may be less a reaction to al-Mansour’s filmmaking and more of a reflection of the audience’s own subject position.

There’s a great evisceration of Hollywood in here that gets a bit too buried until sentimental schmaltz.

It’s easy enough to admire the evident technical merits, yes, but difficult to find any element that invites a viewer into the specific, soulful experience of the characters. As The Death of Robin Hood circles the obvious ending, the main point of reflection it invites is the missed opportunity to flesh out this world with a level of detail on par with its ambitions.

In Disclosure Day, cosmic truth does not arrive as salvation or doom, but as a question of whether humanity can still hear something beyond its own terror. The film’s answer is fragile, luminous, and deeply moving: maybe awe is what survives when we finally stop shouting.

Pressure moves along with enough of a hook to keep one invested, despite its predetermined conclusion and overly familiar structure. As far as paying respect to the unsung heroes that meteorologists were in the war effort, the film carries out its duty. In terms for bringing the winds of change to the subgenre of WWII films, the result is more static than airborne.

Backrooms could have easily been disposable internet-horror junk food—a feature-length extension of creepypasta aesthetics with nothing underneath. Instead, Parsons delivers something far more haunting: an affecting horror film about imprisonment, memory distortion, and the private hell of mistaking isolation for refuge.

From the sigh-inducing jokes to the rom-com blueprint “Ladies First” never strays from, the film keeps threatening to become stranger and more interesting than it is.

As enigmatically as “The Meltdown” unfurls, it leaves enough clues above ground for one to patiently decipher the intricate ideas Martelli is working through in her quietly commanding, narratively rich sophomore film.

Masters of the Universe asks the audience to care about its hero’s destiny while constantly reminding them how silly it all is. By the end, the power is there in theory, but conviction never dares to show its face.