Excerpt: Mixing the high stakes, small town politics of “Welcome to Mooseport” with the farmland morals (and sucker punch twist) of …“Promised Land”…“Irresistible” is just too been-there-done-that to have much relevance.
Excerpt: Irresistible is a moderate call to arms amid a growing chasm of right vs. left. There’s an honest appeal for humanity to which writer/director Jon Stewart wishes to aspire.
Excerpt: The filmmaking is elegant and gorgeous, but it still can’t help but feel stock and standard. However, Shailene Woodley still manages to shine through.
Excerpt: Love this cast, but, my god, I hate these characters. I hate this miserable take on romance, which mistakes wallowing in self-pity for introspection, and people being awful for philosophical depth.
Excerpt: Some sorry millennials will gravitate to this story, but Daphne’s life was too much a thoughtless, self-centered, woe-is-me story of an unemployed, unrealized woman for a mature audience to appreciate.
Excerpt: End of Sentence is brilliant binding of shadows and light, each eviscerating their opponent in a heated competition to see which one gets loose first.
Excerpt: Humans and Nature combine here to make us shed more than one tear. Still, “End of Sentence” deserves cheers. It shines a light on hope, not tears.
Excerpt: In one amazing sequence, the camera follows Merab through room after room of David’s wedding reception toward his heartbreak before doubling back against the irony of dancing guests… His final, rebellious dance for Aleko and Beso is a complete show stopper.
Excerpt: And Then We Danced is a love story, but it’s not merely a sexual awakening. We’re watching as Merab is exposed to a world he’s been conditioned to ignore.
Excerpt: Akin doesn’t discover many original wrinkles in this coming out story, but it’s the powerful cultural context, and some terrific dancing and acting by Gelbakhiani, that earn this movie its dancing shoes.
Excerpt: And Then We Danced es una vibrante, desafiante y enternecedora semblanza sobre el primer amor, aquel que deja una huella indeleble en nuestros corazones para siempre. Un relato necesario que muestra que el amor es amor, sin etiquetas ni prejuicios.
Excerpt: By removing any hint of sensationalism from the events, filmmaker Patrick Vollrath focuses on the moment-to-moment uncertainty of people ripped in an instant from the security of their familiar routines, and then forced to face both impossible choices as well as their own mortality.
Excerpt: Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s performance and the filmmakers’ effective tension building makes for an engaging watch, even if there is little going on under the surface.
Excerpt: Mundanity builds to almost unbearable tension, but this isn’t an action movie. It’s a drama grounded in emotional realism thanks to the Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s intense empathy and vulnerable humanity.
Excerpt: At best it reveals the film to be tone-deaf in its bid to humanize victims of a complex situation by placing them in the exact scenario westerners use to dehumanize them.
Excerpt: : It’s hard to pin down in its early goings, often seeming almost parodic… but once Da 5 are reunited in the jungle, the film coalesces into something powerful.
Excerpt: On its surface, Da 5 Bloods is an exhilirating adventure filled with twists, turns, and Spike Lee’s iconic style. However, it’s also a depth-filled character study that his heartbreakingly prescient about our present moment.
Excerpt: Spike Lee’s approach to the material is done with a stirring relevance and fearlessness that shows he is still able to capture the pulse of the zeitgeist better than pretty much anyone else out there.
Excerpt: There is action and drama aplenty, but Spike Lee isn’t here to just entertain us; he never is, he’s here to educate us. We’re on a guided tour of how the black man is the foundation of the United States of America, yet has only received scorn and torment in return.
Excerpt: That’s not to say that the good doesn’t outweigh the bad, though. I merely hypothesize that a great two-hour drama exists within this over-inflated, two and a half hour epic.
Excerpt: Spike Lee’s indelible style, wit, and focus on black issues is what makes the picture as good as it is. He has created – in collaboration with the actors portraying them – four black men who are all dealing with what the Vietnam War did to them. They do so in different ways, and Lee explores the unique ways in which trauma affects and is expressed by those who have survived it.
Excerpt: As a violent home invasion thriller, it’s engaging, it’s intense, Lulu Wilson and Kevin James are both stellar, and it absolutely delivers for genre fans looking to have a gnarly good time.
Excerpt: Becky is bad, just not in a way that’s any fun, and Kevin James neither embarrasses himself nor has an Uncut Gems moment like his pal Adam Sandler.
Excerpt: Writing about movies feels trite right now, but this one is about an angsty tween absolutely eviscerating a gang of hateful Nazis, including one played by Kevin James, and that’s always welcome. Feel-good movie of the summer so far.
Excerpt: Someone has to learn something from [the scenario’s] potential horror. If neither [Becky] nor we learn anything, it’s all just been an exploitative mess of genre tropes.
Excerpt: a more benevolent take on the star/underling dynamic of many films that have come before it with a surprise up its sleeve which you may not see coming and which helps to alleviate some unfortunate flaws.
Excerpt: Featuring a mind blowing, career best performance from Elizabeth Moss, “Shirley” is a tour de force of imagination, director Josephine Decker (“Madeline’s Madeline”) keeping her camera in close to get us inside Shirley’s head.
Excerpt: The film’s overwhelming and somewhat chaotic opening prepares you for its penchant for tension—sexual, suspenseful, and otherwise. On the other hand, the introduction to Shirley barely scratches the surface of the unpredictable rollercoaster that she is
Excerpt: Elisabeth Moss is as great as you’d expect. Josephine Decker’s stylistic touches can sometimes be frustrating, but is more often offers a striking and thrillingly inventive look into the mind of her characters.
Excerpt: It eschews the basic qualities that make a captivating picture. The central protagonist isn’t likable, it moves at a snail’s pace and nothing particularly exciting happens.
Excerpt: A beautiful-ugly film, a work of domestic gothic grotesquerie, of women’s suffocation and sacrifice, pain and isolation. Elisabeth Moss’s performance is next-level glorious in its wackadoo intensity.
Excerpt: Decker portrays it all as though it’s one of Jackson’s psychological horrors—[stepping] to the precipice of danger before all tension releases with a cut.
Excerpt: If Shirley is a biopic at all, it’s by way of psychological thriller. Decker and screenwriter Sarah Gubbins infuse myriad themes into the picture, everything from dread of pregnancy and childbirth, female sexual desire, toxic male behavior (with plenty of toxic female behavior, too), and psychological mind games.
Excerpt: The filmmakers pulled off a brilliant balancing act between the existential horror and awe that comes with potentially confronting things that are beyond our understanding.
Excerpt: Striking sci-fi mood piece, all eeriness and ookiness, wonder and dread. Explicitly Twilight Zone–esque, summoning a midcentury-America innocence in order to shatter its narrowness (and our own).
Excerpt: Expertly weaves together amateur sleuth characters, late ‘50s production design, camera movements to emphasize place and storytelling, and stirs it up in a Twilight Zone pot. Andrew Patterson creates a masterpiece of suspense and wonder.
Excerpt: The “Twilight Zone” nature of it all could easily make way towards full-blown aliens, but Patterson holds course to keep things subdued and focused on reactions instead.
Excerpt: If Andrew Patterson can evoke something as grand as Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind for under a million bucks, I pray to the movie gods that someone gives him a giant Hollywood budget. We need to see what wonders he might conjure with it.
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