Kieran Culkin shines in Jesse Eisenberg’s tender sophomore feature A Real Pain. A poignant meditation on loss, grief, and family history that’s part autobiographical and entirely heartfelt, Eisenberg has seemingly found his groove as a creator interested in melding melancholic human stories with relationship-driven good humor. “Anything that I’ve written that’s good is very personal,”...
Eight former college friends reunite the evening before their friend’s wedding to play a heady game with far-reaching consequences. Such is the set-up for Greg Jardin’s utterly transfixing debut feature, a precisely-constructed explosion of creativity that smashes together the college reunion comedy, puzzle box thrillers, and a Shane Carruth-esque level of science-fiction precision. Skillfully paced...
Jane Schoenbrun’s audacious followup to their attention-grabbing debut We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is billed as a horror feature but it takes careful time developing said horror. And delivers a wallop. A quietly remarkable film, and one that spurred a handful of walkouts during its Sundance premiere, I Saw The TV Glow is...
Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s Freaky Tales, a madcap 1987 Oakland-set anthology, is a lot. Told in four loosely threaded together chapters, this interconnected story of the intersection of corruption, subculture, and violence in Reagan-era west coast America bites off more than it can chew, becoming more of an implosive collision than a meaningful exploration...
When three British teenage friends, Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Skye (Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis), abscond for a weekend holiday of hard partying, thumping clubs, and fast sex, they find that their freewheeling existence is more fragile than imagined. Tara, or “Taz” when she’s in full party animal mode, is the rowdy, raunchy heart and...
'The Beekeeper' is so patently stupid that it starts to feel like a spoof of a John Wick movie. The script is as dopey as they come, even if the…
An impressively staged, skillfully performed remix of the original popular girl comedy satire, 2024’s 'Mean Girls' adds a number of infectious musical tracks to make its story relevant again, without…
Though Bryce McGuire’s horror debut sinks a bit more than it swims, strong performances from Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon almost keep this domestic haunted pool movie afloat. 'Night Swim'…
It has already begun: the long march towards coronating a new quartet of actors whose performances are deemed the finest of 2023. And while the Oscars, Globes, and flurry of other guild awards tend to recognize the same handful of actors over and over again, here at Silver Screen Riot, we have our own version...
End-of-year lists are a rite of passage, a time to select the best of the best from all we’ve seen. And then anguish over what we’ve chosen. Like its small-screen counterparts, 2023 proved to be an unusual year in film. Countless delays due to widespread industry strikes shifted many potential blockbusters to 2024 and beyond,...