"Discussing the ways in which fiction films shift between their linear, wholly narrative impulses and something approaching ethnography is among the most illuminating aspects of movies so deeply tied to a specific time and milieu. En el Séptimo Día, written and directed by Jim McKay, is particularly upfront about this. Near the beginning of the film, a set of onscreen text locates the events of the narrative as Sunset Park, Brooklyn in the summer of 2016, discretely divided into the…

Batman v Superman is a brutal film, but not in its attitudes towards the narrative, the characters, or the viewer. Instead, it is astounding in the frank, unrestrained, yet almost impressionistic approach towards the subject matter and the weighty themes at hand. Snyder and his collaborators are unblinking in their depiction of the violence and lack of heroics that take place in a changed, darker world that in many, many ways reflects our own, but, incredibly, make them palatable in…

I'm not sure whether the greater sin of this film is either how pointlessly offensive or how boring this is. For all of the macho schoolboy posturing that this movie pushes towards the idea that it is a parody and a subversion of a standard superhero movie, it is ultimately a bland and cliched idea that can't decide whether it wants to be a genuinely heartfelt drama or a gleefully juvenile action movie, and becomes neither. Some of the jokes…