Category Archives: Recommended

Sentimental Value review — Superb from start to finish

November 28, 2025 flawintheiris

Directed bu Joachim Trier | Written by Trier and Eskil Vogt | 133 min | ▲▲▲▲▲ | In Cinemas An earlier version of this review appeared on FITI during coverage of the Atlantic International Film Festival A second time watching Sentimental Value, away from the subcutaneous hum of the festival season, confirms what I suspected…Read More

Train Dreams review — A gorgeous heartbreaker of a movie

November 23, 2025 flawintheiris

Directed by Clint Bentley | Written by Bentley and Greg Kwedar, based on a novella by Denis Johnson | 102 min | ▲▲▲▲ | Netflix Here's a stunner, another in Netflix's solid selection of films coming out this fall — we didn't get it in cinemas here, but now it's available on the streamer. It's…Read More

Blue Moon review — An ode to art, loneliness, and beauty

October 22, 2025 flawintheiris

Directed by Richard Linklater | Written by Robert Kaplow | ▲▲▲▲ An earlier version of this review ran during the Toronto International Film Festival in September. We open on Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke, the production working hard to diminish his height and looks) dying alone in the rain in a New York alley in 1943.…Read More

A House of Dynamite review — Kathryn Bigelow’s terrifically tense nuclear thriller

October 14, 2025 flawintheiris

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow | Written by Noah Oppenheim | 112 min | ▲▲▲1/2 | On Netflix It's been a long while since we've experienced a truly terrifying nuclear thriller. (Anyone remember the opening 10 minutes of Wargames?) Maybe because the threat of nuclear war feels weirdly abstract in the face of climate change, rising…Read More

Roofman review — Channing Tatum’s gentleman thief is a charmer

October 12, 2025 flawintheiris

Directed by Derek Cianfrance | Written by Cianfrance and Kirt Gunn | 126 min | ▲▲▲▲ Right off the bat, what makes Roofman so terrific is it's another tale about America today — even as it's set a few years in the past, there's something undeniably current about this story, which is based in fact.…Read More

One Battle After Another review — Rebels without a pause

September 26, 2025 flawintheiris

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson | Written by Anderson, "inspired by" Thomas Pynchon's Vineland | 141 min | ▲▲▲▲ What we've got here is a new chaotic, action-packed epic from PTA. We haven't seen anything close to this from him since Inherent Vice. That tracks since Anderson's 2014 picture was also adapted from a Pynchon book,…Read More

Caught Stealing review — It’s just as simple as that

August 26, 2025 flawintheiris

Directed by Darren Aronofsky | Written by Charlie Huston, based on his book | 107 min | ▲▲▲▲ In the mid to late 1990s, a swath of crime thrillers were made in the wake of the broad success of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, and QT’s script for Tony Scott's True Romance. Many…Read More

Honey Don’t! review — Fab lesbian b-movie comedy noir

August 25, 2025 flawintheiris

Directed by Ethan Coen | Written by Coen and Tricia Cooke | 89 min | ▲▲▲1/2 In February of last year we got a scrappy, shaggy lesbian comedy from the husband and wife team of Coen and Cooke — Drive Away Dolls. It suffered a little in comparison to the many classics Ethan Coen made…Read More

Relay review — A cracking New York thriller

August 23, 2025 flawintheiris

Directed by David MacKenzie | Written by Justin Piasecki | 112 min | ▲▲▲▲ A version of this review appeared during the coverage of #TIFF24 in September of last year. This picture is an achingly chilly, exceptionally well-crafted anti-tech tech thriller, one that may not quite be in Michael Clayton or The Parallax View's league,…Read More

Weapons review — The kids are not alright

August 11, 2025 flawintheiris

Written and Directed by Zach Cregger | 128 min | ▲▲▲1/2 | Crave It's easy to see why some in the audience might think the new horror/drama by Zach Cregger (Barbarian), about a group of vanished children, is a school-shooting analogy, but there's more going on here than that. In fact, there might be too…Read More