2.5
The question of what exactly went wrong with the winter serial killer fiasco The Snowman will, I hope, puzzle critics and audiences alike for years because, even after seeing it in all its ludicrous glory, there is no satisfying answer.
9
It is not an exaggeration to call the film entrancing, drawing you into each scene with perfect filmmaking and perfectly surreal acting to force you through two hours of dread.
2
I stand in awe at Geostorm, a film so ludicrously broken, so haphazardly smashed together, so unrepentantly clichéd, so brutally incoherent, so hilariously self-serious, that it crosses the boundaries of terrible, smashes through the meager definitions of good and bad or right and wrong, transforms itself in the interim, and becomes phenomenal.
9
The warmth and gentleness at the center of Sylvio is swaddled in creativity, layers and layers of inventive, joy-inducing DIY creativity. The film is a testament to the wide-ranging powers of imagination and to see these ideas so lovingly crafted and produced on-screen is an absolute delight. Whatever the reasoning, the sight of Herbert Herpels sinking jumper or planting a tree, with his hands on display like a surgeon awaiting gloves warms my heart. Also, I’m still not sure why an anthropomorphized gorilla displaying genuine kindness and affection through simple hand gestures, muted grunts, and positive posture moved me so, but it did nonetheless.
7
Sylvio becomes a fascinating individual, managing to escape the cornering of what could have been a single-joke idea and instead anchoring a sly and effective comedy.
7
Tragedy Girls digs into the commodification of mass grief and hysteria that marks the town’s usable reactions to the deaths.
5
Red Christmas isn’t afraid to raise complex moral questions and doesn’t back down from their stickiness, but ultimately there’s a lack of pushing the debate fully into tastelessness or a profound purgation.
7
Largely bloodless, the PG-13 chiller marries its conceit with basic horror conventions delightfully while riding the charisma of its fantastic lead actress through the chaotic time loop.
7
Baumbach’s recent output has all been distinctly happier than his first few films, but the underlying personal crises seem more devastating.
4
Dementia 13 comes across as rigid and bland in a way that, seemingly in the effort to differ itself from the original, it had to sacrifice any traceable sliver of a personality.
7
Erica Genereux Smith clearly has a thing for telephones. And, office spaces. Or, I should say telephones in office spaces operated by women, to be more specific. It was the focal point of Are You With Me?, her short film from 2016 that landed on my year-end review of shorts last December.
9
Blade Runner 2049 is the kind of movie that university students will be writing papers on for decades to come.
3.5
If we were to go off of the film's mundane ruminations over the experience of knocking at death's door, the afterlife is an eternal purgatory of being forced to relive the most middling of direct-to-DVD horror films scene by scene.
6
The first half of Soy Nero is a good movie about a young, undocumented immigrant who navigates a labyrinthine system in a quest to achieve citizenship. The second half is an efficient, bracing war film about a small band of soldiers who are ambushed and have to navigate a desolate, dangerous desert.
4.5
Here is a movie begging to be edited, boiled down to its essence, relieved from the languid cross it must bear running at feature length.
6
I love the work of David Lynch, and while I did find this film to be an interesting watch, the Criterion Collection is a project aimed to gather and preserve important pieces of cinema; I just don’t think this release fits within that mold.
