This is what cinema is made for. I can't the last time I saw a film this comionate and generous that invites us to hurt and heal with its characters. Andrew Haigh is such an acute observer on the profound, transformative nature of human intimacy in all its triumphs and flaws, and he's elevated that to a metaphysical realm. Words can't truly capture these intangible feelings of connection and isolation as we seek to understand and be understood, but…

Still find this to be life-affirming pop art, like any Gerwig picture, bursting with joy and bleeding with pathos so acutely that it galvanizes me to live this beautifully unruly life on my own , warts and all. It vitally thrums with her signature creative ingenuity, perfect for a movie all about creation as a vulnerable human act to apply symbolic order to chaos. But Gerwig is as much of a stark realist as she is a vibrant romanticist, and…

Another newspaper review:

You can’t outrun death, but you can at least alter its trajectory long enough to find something meaningful. Similarly, the current state of Hollywood franchises dictates an endless string of cynical sequels, though they can be thrilling enough to circumvent what is possibly cinema’s untimely demise. This is the case for “Final Destination Bloodlines,” the sixth entry in an ongoing horror series where the concept of fatalism is the slasher and his gruesome weapon is a series…

A vigorously crafted contemporary enrichment of the courtroom procedural. Triet seems to be grappling with the nature of objective reality as it skewed by modern biases and dynamics, and it all hinges on our perception of the main character as it is constantly warped by new information and narratives that are formed around her. Sandra Hüller gives the movie searing intensity as her character struggles to find emotional truth and intrapersonal reconciliation in a binary world that only wants to…

(Sighs.) Another Emerald Fennell film that wrestles with the very nature of its own decadence, but I found the results here to be far more hollow than her masterful, incendiary debut. If Promising Young Woman was a candy-coated movie that's bitter to its core, then Saltburn is almost empty behind its sumptuous shell. PYW was an exercise in substantive provocation, invoking sensationalized tropes as it stirringly unveiled the raw human turmoil behind them, but the bold choices here as…