Andrew Crump

Where Grabbers is a raucous gem, Unwelcome is subdued, more polished but sadder.

The power of Fouéré’s performance echoes across the film to its gruesome, tragic ending – further supporting evidence of the past’s grip strength on people of any generation.

Arterton’s at a peak in her career here, repurposing bits and pieces of her work in Their Finest for a film with much more intentional sentiment.

Like many of the bright suggestions The Pod Generation offers, it would have been better left trimmed from the story, not because the outcomes and repercussions of the tech shouldn’t be explored but because there isn’t room to explore them all in under two hours.

The Last Matinee embraces the cat-and-mouse game between the killer and those to be killed as horror’s naughty pleasure. It’s central to the genre’s function in cinema.

The Strange Ones is a solid movie on first watch that becomes a seriously good movie on second watch. Maybe that’s a poor framework for an endorsement, but the film is more than the shock of its climax.

Backstory is fine. Seeing King introduce scores of anonymous leering henchmen to their varying deaths is better.

All the components for bite are here, from unflattering character portraits to hideous amorality, but The Commune never clamps down quite as hard as you’d like it to. Your time won’t be wasted with the movie, but it won’t send you out of the theater scarred, either.

Color Out of Space feels shaggy at the edges but so rich within them that the flaws of the DIY aesthetic matter less than the merits of Stanley’s perspective.

There’s some surprisingly compelling footage, played over the end credits, of real life Juggalos providing testimonials about what their community means to them, and in that a message about understanding the misunderstood.

Army of the Dead is a film full of pleasant surprises, but Matthias Schweighöfer, playing a German safecracker with a hair-trigger for impassioned speeches about locks and bolts, is perhaps the most pleasant surprise of them all.

What Buffalo Boys lacks in originality it makes up for in spirit. There’s a verve in Wiluan’s direction, a sense of joy shaping his approach to the tried and true familial vengeance hook.

What makes Body at Brighton Rock such good fun is understanding where Wendy is coming from, and connecting to the very specific engine that’s fueling her fear. The movie’s truth doesn’t disappoint, because the truth is that nature plays tricks on the mind.

The film’s abundance of tenderness and lack of cringe laughs, save for that opening sex scene, lets it stand out from its feel-bad comedy peers.

Maybe this isn’t the sophomore picture we’d hoped for, but it’s sharp and insightful regardless.

Wild Indian doesn’t have answers. There aren’t any. Instead, there are experiences, and Corbine Jr. captures his protagonists’ personal transformations with steeled honesty.

Dour as Paris appears through Lubtchansky’s lens, Garrel’s filmmaking is dexterous enough that A Faithful Man feels merry all the same.

Just like the black ichor seeping into Laura, Matriarch saturates viewers’ senses until it pays off its many adumbrations with unexpected revelations.

It’s possible to fuse pulp with prestige while still saying smart things about the seismic political shifts required for creeps like the Proud Boys to skitter from the rocks they live under and infest society’s better elements. The Wrath of Becky makes no such effort. It’s built to thrill and made for chuckles, offset by Seann William Scott’s looming menace.

It’s her unstoppability, her tireless drive to see through the work she believes needs doing in the field of sexual enlightenment that gives Ask Dr. Ruth real urgency, lifting what’d be an otherwise breezy character portrait to near essential levels.

Slattery and Bernbaum’s adherence to genre standards may hold Maggie Moore(s) back from doing anything new in its space, but not from doing anything worthwhile. There’s nothing wrong with a messy low-level crime movie done right.

The China Hustle handily clarifies opaque topics and moves like a bullet, but the bullet catches us right in the gut. By the time the film ends you’ll wish you could go back to being ignorant again.

There isn’t an action movie out there in 2017 that’s quite like it (for better or for worse), no action movie either as crazy or as committed to its craziness.

Consider The Forever Purge as the “well, well, well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions” meme as a horror film.

Anybody could direct this kind of story, and many already have. But There’s Something Wrong with the Children is right in Benjamin’s wheelhouse, and her skill with this familiar set-up is a major boon.

The Commuter isn’t a tough puzzle to solve, and it veers closely to being obvious at times. But easy, unsubtle, unabashedly masculine action films don’t need nuance as long as they’re this much of a goofy pleasure to watch.

The Third Murder may not be Kore-eda’s best work, but the film proves a satisfying challenge, a complex exploration of sin and righteousness in an amoral world.

Posley balances Bitch Ass’ moral dilemma with clever, exuberant filmmaking.

As an exercise in suspense and genre mimesis, Burial is exceptional. But Parker slacks on the details that function as musculature for the film’s core entertainment.

As a showcase for its leads, it’s delightful. All it’s missing is a touch of honest-to-goodness gravity to keep the story anchored.

Mosquito State is a profoundly annoying film. Believe it or not, this is meant as the highest compliment.

More studio comedies should take chances on their principal cast members the way I Want You Back does. Even if little else here worked, at least Day and Slate do.

This isn’t a movie in search of a greater meaning. It just needs to be entertaining. But it does both, and better still, it bothers to be creative.

Lee’s making finely tuned action here; organizing history lessons isn’t his job. But the ferocity of Hunt’s combined action and momentum let him bristle over past atrocities even if those atrocities aren’t his focal point.

Alien takes the long way around the barn to get from its creator’s fundamental psychic “stuff” to the genre classic it is today; Memory: The Origins of Alien, dissects the journey from concept to conception in microscopic detail, and w

As delightful as relentless CGI monster mayhem is—and there’s plenty to go round as The House with a Clock in Its Walls rolls through its final act—it’s the lovely character work that makes the story memorable. Roth and his cast pack a surplus of exuberance into a children’s fantasy mold that’s by now grown musty.

In Search of Fellini isn’t a sophisticated movie. Instead, it’s a joyful movie, and the lack of refinement, whether embodied by the overuse of Fellini clips or the lack of juicy material for Bello and Rajskub to sink their teeth into, shows without stymying the movie’s intentions as a love note to its namesake.

The Beach House plays an adept slow burn game. Brown fleshes his characters out nicely, giving them all ballast without worrying about whether we’d want to sit down for shellfish with them.

In her recent roles, like Lamb and the imminent You Will Not Be Alone, Rapace has expressed boundless terror and awe in the pursuit of existential questions about being human. In Black Crab, she reminds us with steely resolve that she’s incredibly capable at performing toughness, too.

Small Town Crime doesn’t give us much to hang onto apart from its casting, and from its experiential beer-stained, cigarette-tainted atmosphere.

Unlike Bliss, which has a cogent intention pushing it forward, VFW plays slapdash, which admittedly fits the film’s grimy aesthetic, a delirious theme park ride. Maybe that’s all a horror movie needs to be to be worth watching, but Begos can do more than douse a set with viscera, even if VFW doesn’t need “more” to justify itself.

Even at their breeziest, Crano’s punchlines cost exorbitant amounts of discomfort.

Juvenile is as juvenile does, but the Broken Lizard fellows supplement their puerile nonsense with abiding endearment. They’re idiots, but sincere, disarming idiots. Like the characters they play in both movies, they mean well, but meaning well comes in second to antics when spending your career making concerted efforts to avoid responsibility.

Golja and Gossett’s joint appeal—his rascally charm, her coltish earnestness—gives The Cuban soul, shining light through the gloom of brain decline and the horrors of an ambivalent healthcare system. Who needs validation when you have heart?

Ghost Stories’ failure to see its established ideas through to the end doesn’t totally negate the viewing experience. Each segment remains effectively chilling in a vacuum where the movie’s climax doesn’t exist.

The Rental has De Palma vibes with Fincher’s cool, but lacks the former’s exploitative pleasures and the latter’s cinematic expertise. It is, however, satisfyingly composed in terms of approach, giving the audience flashes of brutality to come or shooting it from a distance, heightening the shock and lending bloodshed sharp flinching power.

At its best The First Purge functions like a much-reduced Purge movie retread. It’s not that it’s bad, really. It’s that we’ve seen this before.

Ruskin’s examination of the social and political elements that enabled the Strangler, and which held people like McLaughlin in contempt for attempting to serve the public good, is bold. In his next film, he should apply that same boldness toward an aesthetic purpose, too.

Gilroy isn’t a drudge, of course, and Washington is Washington. If nothing else, the film rides on his mesmerizing performance and on Gilroy’s talent for character study. But after Nightcrawler, seeing Roman J. Israel, Esq. coast on craft rather than on transgression is nothing short of a letdown.

Either Ritchie didn’t bring his typical slickness for the ride, or he’s chopped up Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre intentionally to take the piss out of the genre. The effect at least feels more like comfort than boredom.

Tthe best elements of Don’t Leave Home – its foreboding tone, its photography, and Roddy Sr.’s soulful, remorseful performance as Burke – override its head-scratching missteps.

The Limehouse Golem has costumes, and drama and an abundance of severed appendages, splattered gore and artfully dismembered bodies, and maybe that’s all any horror fan can ask for. Still: There’s nothing wrong with hoping for more.

When a horror movie goes out of its way to make its viewers feel as terrible as “In My Mother’s Skin” does, then that movie might just as well make feeling terrible worth it. Dagatan’s eye for gnarly practical and CG effects is buttressed by solid visual sensibilities, occasionally hamstrung by stray washed-out nighttime sequences, and wicked morality.

Happily, the narrative moves ahead quickly, the better to demonstrate new, inventive methods of reducing murder-happy billionaires to sloppy carcasses in between beats where Weaving and Newton get to play off of one another.

Isabelle Huppert walks on screen in Luc Bondy’s False Confessions intent, it seems, on reminding audiences that she can do anything, including turn a modern adaptation of outdated theater tropes into near-vital product.

Little Joe could use a trim for better deployment of plot and unnerving atmosphere. No matter. Little Joe is a quirkily rattling movie, an off-kilter tonic during the year-end onslaught of movies proclaimed “important” by their studios, and what the film lacks in structure it makes up for in its eerie, cold singularity.

Pulling focus from what is essential to The Legend of Ochi, from acting to artifice, throws the experience into haze–and not the fantasy kind, either, but the distended, stumbling kind that lets the pace go limp as the themes go slack. It’s to Saxon’s great credit as a visionary that The Legend of Ochi justifies the experience anyway, on the strength of its rare craftsmanship alone.

The film’s admirable attempts at preserving its enigmas, while finding the greatest unsettling effect in commonplace human fanaticism, offer an experience unique from Bier’s work with Bullock. But Bird Box Barcelona’s lack of grit and prevailing aversion to the gruesome realities of its own premise are a drag on the details that click.

The Tiger Hunter isn’t exactly the most woke comic effort you’ll see in 2017, but there’s a particular pleasure taken in watching Khan pick apart our beloved national fable through a South Asian lens, even though that lens indulges a traditional and long-expired style of racial profiling.

Young Ahmed isn’t the affront to taste people feared it would be. But its lack of genuine depth feels like an offense unto itself.

Together, McCoy and Williams make The Owners stand out. Newness is a big ask for movies visiting territory this familiar. Two outstanding central performances, however, make a much more reasonable expectation.

At its best, The Perfection is an homage to 1970s horror movies and 1980s thrillers, a glorious, multi-hewed mind screw.

Most of Best Sellers’ problems have to do with structure instead of performance, so there’s not much that Plaza and Caine can do. They’re stymied by the writing and constricted by the direction.

To the Erwins’ credit, they make an effort at taking their movie somewhere interesting and, at least for a Jesus-y football picture, new.

What Keeps You Alive’s forthright quality feels refreshing, and Minihan’s craft is a major plus, too.

There are problems with Mrs. Hyde that have nothing whatsoever to do with Bozon’s puzzling creative choices, though for perspective’s sake, the problems are dwarfed by the choices.

Love, Antosha lays Yelchin’s immense spirit bare, but the film remains wanting for depth. Make no mistake: This is the definitive Encyclopedia of Anton Yelchin, a tome to chronicle the best of him. But there’s so much about him to learn, and so much breezed over to fit into a 90-minute running time, that Price’s study feels somewhat diffuse.

There’s solace to take in the realization that in another director’s hands, The Silent Twins would have been completely standardized, absent the redeeming artistic value invested in the film by Smoczynska’s presence. But the film doesn’t capitalize on her vision.

The atmosphere that Franz and Fiala maintain isn’t a replacement for thoughtful writing, and their visual inventions are undone by the secrets that inspire them.

Granted, the film might not have turned out much better had Smit stuck with one perspective or the other, but at least it would have had constancy. Instead, it reads strictly as a video game, sans the requisite interactive gratification.

The Mauritanian plays by the numbers, hitting courtroom conspiracy drama beats dutifully but without any urgency. From the start, everyone on every side of the court is running out of time, and hitting their heads on brick walls of government silence, which, though drawn from real life, remains a well-worn genre cliché played too heavily by Macdonald’s direction.

Zlokovic’s film misses the point of celebratory tongue-in-cheek referentialism, not to the point where the horror cinema gods will force reassessment of The Babadook’s status as a contemporary classic, but enough to cheapen everything of merit about Appendage.

There’s a long pedigree for Casarosa, Andrews and Jones to live up to. Mostly what they manage is sweetness, and so sweetness must suffice. A little more body would have been better.

It is intermittently a blast, particularly when Bale and Damon ham it up with each other, trading jabs and one-liners, and having childish slap fights in broad daylight as Miles’ saintly, patient wife Mollie (Caitriona Balfe) quietly observes. But when it isn’t a blast, Ford v Ferrari is politically muddled to the point of distraction.

The Boys, Samaritan is not. But even a failed attempt at making a superhero movie out of whole cloth rather than pre-existing IP is welcome, particularly one that challenges the genre’s mores.

Behind You stumbles on inconsistency at best and hesitation at worst.