indieWire

It's a shame because the myth at the heart of this story has such a rich history to it, and the film is bookended by scenes that render Fei Fei's Chinese family with great warmth and exquisite detail.

Posted Oct 21, 2020

C+

Run (2020)

There's enough go-for-broke and whiplash-inducing shifts in tone on display to suggest this filmmaking duo has a future, even when their characters don't seem to have a past.

Posted Oct 21, 2020

B-

Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation (2020)

Working with better documented subjects, she had to find a creative way into the ubiquitous figures. The resulting film, while engaging enough, doesn't amount to more than an amusing bit of fun.

Posted Oct 21, 2020

Nocturne (2020)

Still, the way this story unfolds, and how it unpeels its protagonist into a sexually deflowered, master musician is too predictable to be scary, despite a few striking tableaux involving a psychedelic.

Posted Oct 21, 2020

Belushi (2020)

It's always fun to sit through a clip reel when the talent quotient is this high, but "Belushi" doesn't sugarcoat the sadness at the core of the actor's legacy.

Posted Oct 21, 2020

Bruce Springsteen's Letter to You (2020)

If this film makes anything clear amidst its hazy recollection and hangout vibe, it's that Springsteen feels a certain religiosity to the act of playing in a band, and practicing for the eternity to come.

Posted Oct 21, 2020

Love and Monsters (2020)

Michael Matthews' "Love and Monsters" is the rarest kind of movie these days: A fun, imaginative, genre-mashing adventure that was made with a modest amount of big studio money.

Posted Oct 21, 2020

The Sounding (2020)

Rich in its execution and careful in its approach, "The Sounding" resonates.

Posted Oct 21, 2020

B-

White Noise (2020)

"White Noise" culminates by letting its subjects share their delusions of grandeur, but can't sort out if they're pathetic or practical in these uncertain times.

Posted Oct 21, 2020

American Selfie: One Nation Shoots Itself (2020)

It's nearly impossible to absorb all this rage, but Pelosi endeavors to synthesize it into one frenetic portrait of a country on the brink.

Posted Oct 21, 2020

D+

The Witches (2020)

Zemeckis has made some unsuccessful films over the last 20 years, but "The Witches" is the most frustrating of them all because it feels like it could've been made by somebody else.

Posted Oct 21, 2020

B+

I'm Your Woman (2020)

It's almost too easy to recall the Jean-Luc Godard quote that every movie needs a girl and gun, but "I'm Your Woman" takes that truism and it endows it with fresh purpose.

Posted Oct 21, 2020

D+

The Lie (2020)

Too stupid to be the hard-hitting drama it was first sold as and too self-important to be the black comedy it really should be, Sud's film is a master class in bad decision-making, improbable choices, and overwrought acting.

Posted Oct 16, 2020

Yellow Rose (2020)

Diane Paragas' film finds fresh ground to explore the price and the power of the American dream, bolstered by country crooning and heartbreaking (and very real) legal worries.

Posted Oct 16, 2020

The Kid Detective (2020)

Something curious, laced with pitch black comedy and a major dose of tragedy, a winking sense of genre, and a stellar performance from Adam Brody.

Posted Oct 16, 2020

C+

Rebecca (2020)

Wheatley has never been one to hedge his bets or compromise his vision, so it's curious that he would slap on a pair of velvet handcuffs and volunteer to make something that's so beholden to the past.

Posted Oct 15, 2020

BLACKPINK: Light Up the Sky (2020)

The K-pop phenomenon may still feel new to some consumers (it's not), but if nothing else, Suh's film handily does away with the sense that these superstars are simply part of a pre-packaged cultural machine.

Posted Oct 14, 2020

B-

Clouds (2020)

"Clouds" keeps its focus squarely on the ground from start to finish, and it soars that much higher for it.

Posted Oct 13, 2020

12 Hour Shift (2020)

Grant's script only hints at a sordid past that's never as fleshed out as it needed to be for "12 Hour Shift" to earn the emotional undertow of its ending, but Bettis' clenched face helps fill in the rest.

Posted Oct 13, 2020

B-

French Exit (2021)

Wry and beguiling...

Posted Oct 12, 2020

C+

Evil Eye (2020)

Even then, it's too late, and while "Evil Eye" packs plenty of compelling cultural specificity inside its frames, it never attempts to dig any deeper into the wider world of that stuff that would scare anyone.

Posted Oct 12, 2020

A-

Soul (2020)

Kaleem Aftab

Like some of the best jazz compositions, it uses a traditional framework to veer off in many unexpected directions, so that even the inevitable end point feels just right.

Posted Oct 11, 2020

D+

The War with Grandpa (2020)

"The War With Grandpa" may be over, but Hollywood's war on taste slogs tirelessly on.

Posted Oct 9, 2020

B-

A Call to Spy (2020)

Like the story it follows, it's the result of many talented women working together for the common good.

Posted Oct 5, 2020

B-

Scare Me (2020)

"Scare Me" packs ambitious ideas inside a small-scale concept.

Posted Oct 5, 2020

B+

Beans (2020)

If rendering their stories artfully through a camera lens opens just one mind, then "Beans" is already an unmitigated triumph.

Posted Sep 28, 2020

C+

Spring Blossom (Seize printemps) (2020)

Those are smart creative choices. While "Spring Blossom" may demand judicious pruning, it hints at bigger things yet to bloom for Lindon.

Posted Sep 28, 2020

B-

Violation (2020)

Only Miriam emerges as a character to latch onto, but she's too emotionally elusive to moor the audience in even her basest motivations. All the pieces of a delectable genre piece are here, but nobody's home.

Posted Sep 28, 2020

The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel (2020)

The need for Abbott and Bakan to make this sequel is unfortunately much clearer than the need for us to watch it.

Posted Sep 28, 2020

C+

Falling (2020)

Often abrasive, occasionally sweet, and sometimes grasping for transcendence, "Falling" doesn't feel like a story that Mortensen wanted to tell so much as it does a deeply personal examination of human fragility.

Posted Sep 28, 2020

180 Degree Rule (Khate Farzi) (2020)

"180 Degree Rule" doesn't violate its eponymous inspiration in terms of cinematic language, but Samadi does seem oddly insistent on bucking other film rules, like basic character development

Posted Sep 28, 2020

Wildfire (2020)

Despite these fashionable aesthetic choices for an indie film, Brady makes her story feel fresh, alive, and specific, simmering with just-out-of-reach-dread, but also adorned by the very particular relationship at the film's center.

Posted Sep 28, 2020

B-

True Mothers (Asa ga kuru) (2020)

Kawase ties everything together beautifully in the end, even if the strands coming out of the movie's core get a little gnarled along the way.

Posted Sep 28, 2020

C-

The Secrets We Keep (2020)

A listless, half-baked, vaguely Hitchcockian thriller.

Posted Sep 28, 2020

B+

The Calming (Ping Jing) (2020)

"The Calming" might sound like a Redbox-worthy piece of schlock - and there are, in fact, several low-rent thrillers and horror movies that share its title - but Song's version does exactly what it says on the tin. Her films are breaths of fresh air.

Posted Sep 28, 2020

B+

City Hall (2020)

By the time "City Hall" arrives at its breathtaking final shots, Wiseman has crafted such an advanced case for understanding every aspect of local governance that it leads to the impression that America would be a better place if everyone experienced it.

Posted Sep 28, 2020

Fauna (2020)

"Fauna" is over as soon as it begins. Its critiques on the cultural obsession with violent content, and how fiction can bleed into reality for the most vulnerable target, are fleeting but deliver in their modest doses.

Posted Sep 28, 2020

C+

Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles (2020)

A more nuanced documentary - one that didn't just feel like evidence of an event that happened at a museum, but a work of art unto itself - might have made a meal out of such ideas, rather than just offering them for dessert.

Posted Sep 28, 2020

C+

Misbehaviour (2020)

Stellar performances can only carry it so far, and when "Misbehaviour" finally puts all its disparate pieces and people together, the result isn't exciting so much as inevitable and hammily handled.

Posted Sep 28, 2020

C+

Isabella (2020)

Piñeiro's cinema is too lush and vibrant to feel like work, but the catharsis he arranges for us here isn't enough to offset how this film's puzzle box approach disserves the subjective interiority that "Isabella" tries to solve with it.

Posted Sep 28, 2020

C+

Kiss the Ground (2020)

While platitudes about how this is really just about love - not money or industry or good old-fashioned greed - are far too simplistic, at least the movie attempts to make its issues feel personal enough to make people care.

Posted Sep 28, 2020

Limbo (2020)

The movie could easily fall into a bland sentimental routine from there, but Sharrock's irreverent tone turns Farhad's journey into a strange and involving one.

Posted Sep 28, 2020

Inconvenient Indian (2020)

An evocative and visually ripe love poem to Canadian Indigenous culture.

Posted Sep 28, 2020

Secret Society of Second-Born Royals (2020)

"Secret Society of Second-Born Royals" is such a sad baby chimera of second-wave digital content that the mere act of reviewing it feels unnecessarily hostile.

Posted Sep 28, 2020

A-

The Boys in the Band (2020)

The result is a sophisticated, tart-tongued revival, and a gayed-up "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" that surmounts the challenges faced by stage-to-screen adaptations, specifically the utter confinement to a single space.

Posted Sep 25, 2020

The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020)

A look back at rabble-rousers from another era won't change the world, but "Chicago 7" is a solid tribute to a few men who realized they could, even when the system they fought for came up short.

Posted Sep 24, 2020

B+

76 Days (2020)

The film's value to future generations is self-evident, but it has just as much to show us in the here and now about the history we're making alone and together.

Posted Sep 23, 2020

B+

On The Rocks (2020)