Andrew Crump

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.