In Review Online

A collection of 54 posts

In Review Online

The Threesome

What’s the worst thing that can come from a threesome?

Baltic Cinema

Laguna

Grief can be foreboding like a lagoon; it can simultaneously and contrapuntally be a site for a baptismal-like transformation. Laguna understands this.

Palestinian Cinema

Palestine 36

Perhaps the most comprehensive and valuable narrative drama to survey the origins of Palestinian subjugation in the Levant.

Toronto International Film Festival 2025

Aki

Aki is like a prayer ... beautiful, personal, and uncomfortable all at once.

Screenlife

LifeHack

If Unfriended: Dark Web is Screenlife showing the Internet at its worst, LifeHack, while not unafraid of that darkness, is much more optimistic about its potential.

Korean Cinema

Dark Nuns

The theology of Dark Nuns stands apart from the usually strong Christological theologies that the exorcism genre has stood on for decades.

In Review Online

Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight

Needlessly chasing its own tail

Ilya Naishuller

Heads of State

Already a relic from another time

In Review Online

How to Train Your Dragon

2025's How to Train Your Dragon drags and loses its way under a strained and failed effort to make everything bigger and bolder.

Korean Cinema

The Old Woman with the Knife

For all their effort to hide age in the action, the filmmakers take the opposite approach to the symbolism.

In Review Online

Karate Kid: Legends — Jonathan Entwistle [Review]

Much like a child trick-or-treating in a small neighborhood and returning again and again to the same houses, the Karate Kid franchise will keep coming back until it no longer gets the goods it asks for.

Reviews

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk — Sepideh Farsi

Fatima Hassouna might have had the brightest smile and biggest eyes in all of Gaza.

In Review Online

iHostage

The copagandiest of them all.

Chinese Cinema(s)

Striking Rescue — Siyu Cheng [Review]

Striking Rescue cinematographer Ai Yanjie loses sight of much of the action and regrettably tempers the blows of the stunt team.

Palestinian Cinema

Leila and the Wolves — Heiny Srour [Review]

Leila and the Wolves ... holds a special place within that tradition of boundary-pushing Leftist filmmaking from the Arab Levant.

Reviews

Orenda — Pirjo Honkasalo [IFFR ’25 Review]

Orenda is by no means a bad film and in fact mightily impresses in moments, its inconsistency undermines testimony of any genuine orenda.

Reviews

Star Trek: Section 31 — Olatunde Osunsanmi

The Star Trek franchise has finally delivered its first truly unwatchable feature film

Reviews

Heavier Trip — Juuso Laatio & Jukka Vidgren

This is likely the kind of thing that Werner Herzog was talking about when he said, “I’m fascinated by trash TV. The poet must not avert his eyes.”

Reviews

The Fix — Kelsey Egan

The Fix, a new South African sci-fi film that takes place in a world where breathable air is a thing of Earth’s pastime, opens perfectly.

Reviews

Magpie — Sam Yates

Magpie is the latest boring and impotent addition to the genre shelf.

Reviews

Aberdeen — Ryan Cooper, Eva Thomas [TIFF ’24 Review]

Perhaps it’s still an important film, but it’s not particularly good.

Reviews

The Critic — Anand Tucker

Any movie that features a theater critic as a main character invites more intentional criticism.

Reviews

Maldoror — Fabrice Du Welz

this anti-creative decision turns out to be an predictive of the woefully misguided and frankly arrogant film that it precedes.

Reviews

Dancing Village: The Curse Begins — Kimo Stamboel

Instead of relying on jumping out of closets and dark rooms to generate one-second bodily reactions, The Curse Begins funneled its horror through the horrible realization that one day, if you aren’t already, you too will grow old and decrepit.

Reviews

12.12: The Day — Kim Seong-su [NYAFF ’24 Review]

“In the end, they swallowed up the nation as a whole.”