The film forgets that if you’re not building something new from familiar pieces then you’re just regurgitating old ideas.
The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey starts strong but its main character only grows thinner as the story progresses.
Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber is awkwardly split between a broader look at Uber and a bog-standard rise-and-fall narrative.
Ice-Pick Lodge’s game is in direct conversation with the developer’s Pathologic series, and seems to serve as a kind of inverse to it.
While The Cuphead Show certainly boasts a unique flavor, it also feels restricted by its trappings.
Throughout, Josephine Decker effortlessly keys her intimate and eccentric style to her main character’s complicated inner turmoil.
The film, in trying to play “gotcha” with its audience, trips over itself and totally unravels in the process.
Sifu is built on parrying and timing to a degree that can feel brutally difficult, if not outright inaccessible.
The film provides no space to explore its relationships, and as a result there’s little friction to the climax.
The Afterparty attempts a deceptively tricky balancing act between murder mystery and comedy.
Though The House is handsomely made, the anthology series as a whole lacks a sturdy foundation.
After a while, writer-director Iuli Gerbase’s boldly mundane take on forced isolation gives way to a regular sort of mundanity.
The film is a thoughtful examination of the human desire for it and the accompanying hope that it may exorcise the emptiness we feel.
For all of its sense of genuine, thrilling speed in its mechanics, Solar Ash fails to muster any sense of accompanying narrative momentum.
Netflix’s live-action Cowboy Bebop feels more cartoonish than the anime that spawned it.
Lost Judgment feels like a genuine alternative to the Yakuza games of yore, albeit one that’s still reluctant to leave its comfort zone.
Chucky walks a fascinating tonal tightrope as a funny, absurd series that engenders sympathy as well as shock.
The game often lets its stylistic tics drag the experience into varying degrees of frustration.
Because the atmosphere encompasses so much of Sable’s appeal, the technical issues can be absolutely ruinous.
The film capsizes in the absence of a compelling center for Mélanie Laurent to hang her directorial panache.