“The Sharks” ("Los Tiburones" in the original Spanish title) is something special. Uruguayan writer/director Lucía Garibaldi's feature-length debut is a coming of age tale that gets to the heart of its subject without judgment or forced and phony life lessons. This is a careful and organic look at a teenager on the cusp of becoming a woman.

Almost overwhelmed

What can one say when a great performance is lost on a film so enamored with itself that it becomes less and less endearing from scene to scene, finally burying any good graces it may have had?

The answer? An unfortunate negative take on the new comedy, “Lazy Susan.”

Sean Hayes is the unambitious Susan O’Connell. Susan can’t hold down a job nor do what

Confinement. Quarantine. Shut in. Whatever you wish to call it, we are all doing our part to stay safe during this tough time. For many of us, the arts are the key to keeping our minds stable through any issue, let alone being stuck in our homes for months. We have novels, music, films and television to see us through.

The world now lives in the age of bingeing

The most frightening film of 2020 is not a horror flick. It’s a film about our electoral process. Chris Durrance and Barak Goodman’s stunning and eye-opening documentary examines how gerrymandering (the act of manipulating boundaries of an electoral constituency to favor one political party) is a very real and very present danger to our American democracy. This could be the most important film of 2020.

Politics in the horror genre is a tricky thing. If done incorrectly, a film’s political slant can hurt its narrative. When done right, a political take can enhance a film’s potency. The late George A. Romero and horror film legend John Carpenter are the two filmmakers who expertly infused their political messages within their works.

Romero, with his series of “...of the Dead” films, made each one a reflection and commentary

Beginning your crime film with “The Passenger” by Iggy Pop is a marvelous idea and one that excitingly sets the tone for the very clever and labyrinthine noir “La Gomera” (“The Whistlers” in the English version). With his latest film director Corneliu Porumboiu has created a fantastic and riveting pop-culture cops-and-mobsters film that occasionally gives way to philosophical leanings.

In this age of YouTube and Twitter, there is simply too much information coming at us twenty-four hours a day. Everyone with a computer is an armchair newscaster. And above all else, when it comes to films everyone is a critic.

What people don’t seem to understand, or rather, what has become lost, is the truth that film criticism is, or can be, an art. No writer before nor since