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9/10
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Frankenstein
(2025)
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Ray Pride
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Del Toro gives the widest, wildest emotions a monster hug... Mansions where the furnishing, draped and regal, are challenged by the characters’ wardrobes... the intimate in the eyes of Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Christoph Waltz, Mia Goth, or anyone else..
Posted Oct 23, 2025
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10/10
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Blue Moon
(2025)
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Ray Pride
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Able comic anecdote of failure and hope, each streaming out of the mounting dissolution of an artistic figure... Linklater quietly sketches agony like cauterizing a psychic wound.
Posted Oct 23, 2025
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10/10
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Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5
(2025)
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Ray Pride
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Moves like a dream, of density, of lightness, of flow and careering logic, a bright nightmare overflowing with piercing prescience... Peck’s hand is sure in fashioning an immersive experience—weaving atmospheric footage of all sorts.
Posted Oct 11, 2025
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8/10
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The Lovers on the Bridge
(1991)
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Ray Pride
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Carax’s reputation was fully established as a willfully mad maker of ravaged canvases of the heart... damp-dark romantic efflorescence... l’amour fou expressed through the built environment and the fireworks of the heart.
Posted Oct 11, 2025
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10/10
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The Tree of Life
(2011)
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Ray Pride
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If you work with a camera that is autonomous and distracted,as Malick does, with promiscuous principal photography that works from inspiration and not text... the meaning gets layered in selection, the decisive moment is then in the edit, not in shooting.
Posted Oct 04, 2025
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9/10
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Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror
(2025)
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Ray Pride
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Involving... Affectionate documentary, warmth radiates as the trajectory of the 1972 stage production to its latter-day legend is charted... rich with remembrances from the past half-century [from the] still-lucid subjects.
Posted Oct 04, 2025
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10/10
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The Addiction
(1995)
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Ray Pride
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Indelible, ineffable Lili Taylor at her formidable best... While the characters drench themselves in grad-school chatter, the milieu is still recognizable as Ferrara’s ultra-serious, ultra-perverse New York and its congeries of overlapping demimondes.
Posted Oct 03, 2025
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6/10
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TURA!
(2024)
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Ray Pride
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Crowdfunded documentary is heavy on low-budget editing techniques—oh, the zooms, oh, the strobing!—but delivers fresh particulars... increasingly wild revelations, all the way to her rediscovery at the end of her life by squadrons of adoring fans.
Posted Oct 03, 2025
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7/10
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Plainclothes
(2025)
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Ray Pride
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Pleasingly paced fable of self-discovery... Set in Syracuse in 1997 [it] plays with the technology of the time as well as attitudes of the decade, and its lo-fi look suits that range of degraded media the cops employ to bust the men they tempt.
Posted Oct 03, 2025
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8/10
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The Lost Bus
(2025)
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Ray Pride
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Paul Greengrass’ impressive wall of heat... builds at scale and sprawl that the grand big screen is so thirsty for... waves and miles of flame rage and consume... the substantial work of a director still at the height of his visceral power.
Posted Oct 03, 2025
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9/10
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Predators
(2025)
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Ray Pride
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Canny and ultimately bone-chilling... The final scenes are stacked coups de théâtre, landing with a succession of punches and then a sad dissipation.
Posted Oct 03, 2025
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9/10
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Happyend
(2024)
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Ray Pride
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Vital, vivid coming-of-rage... A stylish, oft-delirious delight
Posted Oct 02, 2025
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10/10
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Preparation for the Next Life
(2025)
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Ray Pride
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Quietly masterful... the sensation of being in the present moment is stirring and affecting... [Uses] widescreen to capture intimacy and [bears] resonances with... Terrence Malick, Michael Mann’s <i>Heat</i> and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s <i>Millennium Mambo</i>.
Posted Sep 20, 2025
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10/10
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One Battle After Another
(2025)
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Ray Pride
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Present-day dystopia... prodigious Pynchon paranoia [in a] never-flagging war movie, a Western, a family drama of father and daughter reconciliation, political satire. [s] breathlessly accomplished action movie... fearsomely good.
Posted Sep 18, 2025
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9/10
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The History of Sound
(2025)
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Ray Pride
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Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor radiate heightened naturalism.
Posted Sep 18, 2025
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1/10
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The Baltimorons
(2025)
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Ray Pride
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Mucho audience awards at regional festivals, starting with its SXSW debut, and I can see the appeal of its oddly atmospheric, winsome rendition of an “After Hours” vibe. I sat with my heart like a stone.
Posted Sep 18, 2025
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10/10
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Where to Land
(2025)
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Ray Pride
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Reader, I wept. What a beautiful movie is 'Where To Land,' crisp, brisk, wry—a comedy that’s taut yet discursive. Discernibly and distinctively a Hal Hartley movie and under eighty minutes.
Posted Sep 18, 2025
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10/10
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Weapons
(2025)
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Ray Pride
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It’s not that Grimm... It’s a headlong audience picture and no sort of treatise... The Pied Piper story told with extreme prejudice: Zach Cregger's hairline-fracture-time-scramble, sometimes-savage horror ride... is a loopy wellspring of surprises.
Posted Aug 07, 2025
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8/10
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Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore
(2025)
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Ray Pride
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Admiring, admirable portrait of the underappreciated activist and artist, as well as the disappointments and painful turns in her life.
Posted Jul 11, 2025
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10/10
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Caught by the Tides
(2024)
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Ray Pride
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Marvelous catch-all... of... fiction/nonfiction/lyrical dream-drift... The kaleidoscopic dazzle of “Caught By The Tides” is heightened by Jia’s partner in life and art Zhao Tao, who remains one of the world’s greatest movie presences... Breaks the heart.
Posted Jul 11, 2025
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8/10
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Sovereign
(2025)
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Ray Pride
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Piercingly paced true-crime thriller and antihero study... Their journey across the country to spread their legal gospel is achingly observed, as is his delusional protagonist’s descent into madness.
Posted Jul 11, 2025
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9/10
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Superman
(2025)
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Ray Pride
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Beyond the savvy satirical suggestions about contemporary figures of wealth and geopolitics, there’s an extended, intimate conversation between Lois and Clark... seriocomic banter establishing their relationship, their hopes and, yes, journalistic ethics.
Posted Jul 11, 2025
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9/10
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F1 The Movie
(2025)
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Ray Pride
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Delicious apotheosis of the hyperbolic blockbusters Simpson-Bruckheimer made... pencil sketches of characterization for extremely attractive individuals seeking family, accompanied by koan-like capsules... and a smile, and a twinkle, and a smile...
Posted Jun 30, 2025
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9/10
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28 Years Later
(2025)
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Ray Pride
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Expressionist conflagration... generous range of fevered, then becalmed invention... folk horror with high-end zombie fantastication, plus the Scottish land and skies of Powell-Pressburger [and] an elegiac version of the village in <i>Apocalypse Now</i>/
Posted Jun 19, 2025
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7/10
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Ballerina
(2025)
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Ray Pride
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“Baller”-ina, amirite? ... A good, essential action B-movie, hanging from by threads of said world [of "John Wick"]: callbacks and cross-references add modest weight to its kicking of ass and forgetting of names.
Posted Jun 06, 2025
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8/10
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The Phoenician Scheme
(2025)
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Ray Pride
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[A] cryptic capitalist caravan... presided over by the drive, and even majesty, of a singular self-made flimflam man, moving with Wellesian gravitas... the beneficent Benicio del Toro. The Bull! This sybarite macher! Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda!
Posted Jun 03, 2025
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3/10
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Fountain of Youth
(2025)
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Ray Pride
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Opulent yet impoverished... Production cost does not always equal production value... A kooky high concept, a few familiar faces and dialogue from poverty... Presented as a yacht, “The Fountain Of Youth” is a barge, and an uncommonly homely one at that.
Posted May 30, 2025
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10/10
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Final Destination Bloodlines
(2025)
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Ray Pride
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Intelligent, self-aware... eludes meta to become its own honorable entry in the annals of teen spatter... good-natured nastiness of both admirable invention and ghoulish timing... a bright genre delight.
Posted May 30, 2025
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8/10
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Bono: Stories of Surrender
(2025)
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Ray Pride
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Seeks simplicity in a weave of widescreen frames bedazzled with further frames of light, in flashes, in strobing banks, in streams and beams. It is beautiful to look upon... elevates [Bono's] fierce if common curiosity.
Posted May 30, 2025
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8/10
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The Brutalist
(2024)
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Ray Pride
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An ambitious meditation on men and mentorship, about masses of money and stabs and swoops from pencil points. Architecture and filmmalomh require immense quantities of cash... and vast sums of hubris.
Posted Feb 13, 2025
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10/10
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Starship Troopers
(1997)
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Ray Pride
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Cruelly visionary... You should see Verhoeven’s immense satiric mastery on the big screen, you should. (Beware those who identify with the bugs.) You want to know more.
Posted Feb 13, 2025
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9/10
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Oh Canada
(2024)
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Ray Pride
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Schrader’s <i>Oh, Canada</i> is his most formally radical movie since <I>Mishima</i>, and another great “last film” from the seventy-eight-year-old writer-director-producer who’s completed, under his own terms, four films since 2017.
Posted Feb 13, 2025
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5/10
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The Room Next Door
(2024)
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Ray Pride
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Few contemporary filmmakers are as attentive to the radiance of light and color, shape, the glow of light in and on women’s eyes. <i>The Room Next Door</i> is a world of primary colors, of patches and blocks of red and green, bold Hockney-style splashes.
Posted Feb 13, 2025
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10/10
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Hard Truths
(2024)
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Ray Pride
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Its searing virtues work from surfaces and deepen, until its wordless final passages, where one character finds hope and two others must, or die... Pansy is one of the great portraits of contemporary depression and loneliness.
Posted Feb 13, 2025
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10/10
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My Winnipeg
(2007)
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Ray Pride
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An ostensible perambulation down the tracks of Maddin's tearaways from childhood onward on the Manitoba prairie, it’s an elusive tone poem compacted from all his idées fixes.
Posted Feb 13, 2025
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10/10
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In the Cut
(2003)
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Ray Pride
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A raw, tactile consideration of the mystery and suspense of touch and want. Her style is gorgeous and discomfiting, with febrile camera moves, warm yet cloacal lighting, gestures in ruby-and-amber haze.
Posted Feb 13, 2025
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10/10
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I'm Still Here
(2024)
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Ray Pride
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A portrait of strength—which Salles witnessed as a friend of the family, drawn from Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s memoir—and of submerged history, the eddying effect of the killing of just one of hundreds of thousands of disappeared Brazilians.
Posted Feb 13, 2025
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9/10
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Exotica
(1994)
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Ray Pride
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The mood is relentless; the gears spark and grind quietly, but spectacularly... The essence... is damage, unexamined, and the pulse of trauma washing ashore.
Posted Feb 13, 2025
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0/10
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Captain America: Brave New World
(2025)
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Ray Pride
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A tossed salad of yearning for yet another “phase” that will get the Avengers band and brand back together again... The action scenes are plentiful, the editing incomprehensible—oh for the glory days of... scalpel-like onslaughts of clockwork Bayhem.
Posted Feb 13, 2025
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Time Passages
(2024)
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Ray Pride
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Idealized imagery as generations know it meshes with that which cannot be visualized. Chaos, indeed, reigns, and Henry works to domesticate it. The attempt is as vital and captivating and a traditional, highly polished rendition might have been.
Posted Feb 13, 2025
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8/10
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Wolf Man
(2025)
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Ray Pride
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Taken as a statement on man in society, <i>Wolf Man</i> is not a kind portrait... It might not even be a horror film, but a modest slab of psychological terror: how much alone time will drive a man mad, or into the forest for good?
Posted Jan 16, 2025
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0/10
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Joker: Folie à Deux
(2024)
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Ray Pride
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My dour prediction wasn’t too far off the midway: Todd Phillips’ combined self-immolation and sustained “---- you” to audiences that plunked down their hard-earned is wholly in line with his lifetime of self-anointed punk attitude.
Posted Oct 06, 2024
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7/10
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Omni Loop
(2024)
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Ray Pride
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Elemental perplexes come clear through the keen performances you’d expect from this pair of gifted actors. The universe lies in how we react to small moments that hold larger implications.
Posted Sep 23, 2024
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9/10
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My Old Ass
(2024)
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Ray Pride
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Gently nuts and emotionally rich. The cast is swell, including Plaza, who continues to twine deeper, darker strands within her every role... A sweet surprise.
Posted Sep 23, 2024
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8/10
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The Substance
(2024)
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Ray Pride
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Dead-serious body-horror pageant... a salute to surfaces, electric with sensation, cracking with notions and rippling with influences... The Picture of Dorian Gray... Cronenberg’s The Fly ... Black Swan, Mulholland Drive... Society and “Showgirls.
Posted Sep 23, 2024
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8/10
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Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
(2024)
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Ray Pride
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Rickety-rackety cut-up comedy... shares the handmade feel of the first... Moves with its own crackpot velocity... Let the spasmodic mayhem begin... Creepy doings and strange sights and good gags abound, and the dialogue is shaped by every actor...
Posted Sep 08, 2024
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10/10
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Kneecap
(2024)
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Ray Pride
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Bawdy, wildly self-assured, proudly profane and righteously political Belfast sex-drugs-and-hip-hop comedy biopic... Verbals unrelenting, inspired sight gags and unabashed politics... Then there’s the whole matter of the preservation of native cultures…
Posted Aug 29, 2024
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6/10
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The Linguini Incident
(1992)
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Ray Pride
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The resuscitation of his odd sweetheart of a picture... Late twentieth-century screwball satire-heist-romance [not] just a lost film for decades, it was an unfinished one.
Posted Aug 29, 2024
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10/10
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Sing Sing
(2023)
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Ray Pride
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Elevated documentary style... medium-close shots and close-ups, and beginning with the elemental performance by the great Domingo, not one moment of patient observation is amiss... brisk yet also unhurried:standard moments are elevated by pause and breath
Posted Aug 29, 2024
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10/10
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Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In
(2024)
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Ray Pride
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Bittersweet dystopian canvas, but also the purest action machine built on the choreographed denial of physics since the blunderbuss that is <i>RRR<i>. The milieu and the many martial moments are glorious.
Posted Aug 29, 2024
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