Alex Saveliev

Attack the Block this is not. Shortcut is too violent and foul-mouthed for kids, yet too tame and juvenile for adults, bound to leave horror aficionados indifferent. You’ll be better off watching Jeepers Creepers 2 instead, and that’s really saying something.

One thing that works well is Catalina Saavedra’s performance as the tormented Olga. The actress finds truth in an underwritten character. She reminds us that cinema needs more well-acted, nuanced films about those who are still inexplicably shunned. Sadly, Marylin brings little to that table. It purports to say a lot with a little but ends up saying very little with, well, a little.

While decent in capable directorial hands – or as a supporting character – based on the evidence on display here, Carano doesn’t seem quite capable of carrying a film yet, let alone pull a dreary feature like Daughter of the Wolf out of the murk.

The Parish does not even attempt to avoid sentimentality or predictability. Tony Tibbet’s awkward editing reveals a man doing his best to mask budgetary, directorial, and auditory blunders.

For a film that purports to endorses equality and female empowerment, its female characters are so uniformly idealistic they’re borderline interchangeable.

None of it is remotely frightening or original, the admittedly good-looking film adding nothing new to this unfortunate horror subgenre.

Sometimes whimsical, at others quaint, flirting with darkness but brimming with childlike naivety, the plot provides a hell of a tonal whiplash, never finding its rhythm.

The fact that it purports to function as a not-so-thinly-veiled parable about the limitlessness of sexuality, gender fluidity, and the marginalized makes it that much more unbearable.

Despite the involvement of some skilled filmmakers, Portals is a cinematic black hole – vacuous and barely perceptible in the vastness of space lit with far brighter stars.

It’s stale, a relic from another time that’s strenuously updated and forced into 2024.

Nothing To Do doesn’t really do much of anything.

For a sci-fi feature, it’s certainly not visually-stimulating; perhaps it would’ve worked better as an audio-book.

If you enjoy being sober around your trippin’ buddies, then Tyger Tyger may be for you, but you’re much more likely to feel left out.

Eastwood is a formidable filmmaker, a force of nature, whose films like Mystic River will forever remain in the pantheon of Great Cinema. Alas, Cry Macho may likewise be forever regarded as a perplexing glimpse at a different side of the man, one who's created this macho persona and who now attempts to absolve himself, to only – pardon my crude use of the idiom – dig his own grave.

It Snows All the Time resembles a prolonged PSA with all the production values and depth of an infomercial.

In its favor, the film is competently edited, and the low production values aren’t too apparent – thankfully, it’s at least decently assembled.

Shabbily structured, with barely any tension, characterization, scares, or thematic depth, Consecration, due to its utter lack of inspiration, loses the audience’s concentration within minutes, and may even lead to constipation (okay, maybe not the last part, but you get my drift).

The fact that pretty much nothing makes sense renders the dull narrative that much more difficult to bear. So many questions arise regarding the laws established in this film’s universe, I frankly don’t even know where to start. So I won’t

The filmmaker’s sophomore feature fails to generate any semblance of momentum or suspense. It’s filled with laughable lines of dialogue and jarringly poor editing. Mario Van Peebles single-handedly imbues it with enough gravitas to make it somewhat watchable.

Yes, it’s that kind of movie: ludicrous but seemingly unaware of its own pretensions, never quite so-bad-it’s-good, but rarely good enough to rise above bad. The filmmaker seems confident that he’s assembled an “elevated horror,” minimalist masterpiece. Unfortunately, the result is just minimal.

If Pachman intended to reiterate the difficult plight of migrant workers, our disregard and abuse of them, then point made, I guess. Yet for a film titled Beneath Us, it certainly never digs deep under the surface.

The writer and the director rub our faces in muck until all we see is darkness, providing the faintest ray of light at the end. You will be infuriated – not so much at the witnessed injustices as at the filmmaking team for subjecting you to over two hours of grief and misery.

There may be a lot going on here, but none of it sticks; there’s no momentum or a sense of purpose. In other words, Swift fails to achieve lift-off, over and over.

Prepare for a threadbare, hole-ridden plot with cardboard characters, whose ludicrous dialogue is matched by the stupidest twists in recent memory. After a feature like this, the only thing that’s on the line is Gibson’s career.

On paper, You’re Dating a Narcissist! may have looked like a breezy, relatable comedy. In execution, however, a film about narcissism turns out to be almost terminally self-absorbed.

Goi and his screenwriter Anthony Jaswinski must have thought that simply stuffing the film with as many shock tactics as possible would suffice. It doesn’t. This ship goes down with her captains.

Hardcore gorehounds will be disappointed by the lukewarm scares. Fans of throwback films will groan at the lack of tongue-in-cheek references. Anyone who’s seen a film will groan at the stupidity of it all.

An eccentric local priest spouts nonsense, blood gushes out of the shower, bodies twist and contort at impossible angles, and creatures from hell crawl towards the camera. By the time the convoluted, shrieky finale arrives, it all blends together into nothing more than dull background noise. Your investment in the story will be indirectly proportional to its running time.