Brian Tallerico

Gorehounds need not worry that a movie called Deathgasm plays it safe. This is a defiantly, well, metal movie.

It’s an efficient, clever genre mash-up that works because of how well Byrne blocks its action, employs an old-fashioned score, and directs his actors to visceral performances.

It could be funnier. It could be a lot smarter. It could look better. But it also could have been significantly worse, working as much as it does because it knows that you don’t need to be great if you’re this Goofy.

Ben Young’s atrocious Devil’s Peak is a case study of excellent performers being given so little to work with from a script.

It can be so refreshing to see an efficient thrill ride of a movie, a flick that knows what it wants to do and doesn’t waste time doing it. Christopher Landon’s Drop is one of those films, a thriller that unfolds in two locations with few characters, all in pursuit of providing as much entertainment as possible to ticket buyers.

I like these actors. I just wish they were in a better movie.

It’s not just about the divisiveness of 2020; it’s designed to be divisive itself in 2025. To that end, even if you hate it, it’s kind of done its job.

Overall, Okiura stays very focused on Momo’s emotional journey, which is smart. It’s not as fantastical as “Spirited Away” or many other films about children who encounter the supernatural upon being forced to deal with death, as Momo always stays front and center. The final moments of her journey out of despair are powerfully emotional.

The problem is that the Mamet brand of tough-talking puzzle movie is harder to pull off than it looks, and writers Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka just don’t have the gift of dialogue needed to elevate this thriller beyond its foundation.

Perhaps the highest compliment I can pay it is that I think George A. Romero himself would have liked it.

Taking a performer who has lived at the heights of ring-based fame for more than half his life and connecting him to a guy who most wouldn’t recognize at the grocery store is an ambitious, admirable effort, even if I’m not sure one could truly call it entertaining.

So clever and well-done that it makes the sins of the finale easy to forgive.

You can’t make a movie called Monster Hunter that’s boring to look at it, and this is one of Anderson's flattest films in every way.

A bleak, brutal film; at times, its monotony can be draining.

It’s fun, tense, and slimy. It’s also nowhere near as ambitious as some of the films in this series deemed failures. We can’t have everything.

Some will argue that all of the themes of “undertone” don’t connect, but that’s a feature, not a bug. This is a film that doesn’t feel the need to explain itself. Nightmares rarely do.

It’s fun to watch a character like Fletch escape hot water, but it’s never even lukewarm here, and so every time that the movie gets back to its plotting, it just sags like a bad episode of a cable TV mystery-of-the-week show.

It’s a reminder of how good the director of “United 93” and “Captain Philips” can be at transporting us to unimaginable circumstances, and it plays like a truly phenomenal disaster movie that happens to be true, one of those flicks you almost always watch the last hour of if you catch it on cable.

Say what you will about Scott’s most divisive movies—they’re usually big swings with big ideas. What’s so disheartening about “Napoleon” is how small it ultimately feels.

While spending time in one of the most captivating cities in the world is enticing, the main reason to check this out is one of the best performances in the career of Liev Schreiber.

Watching his Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 is to see a director who knows how to balance corporate need with personal blockbuster filmmaking. Mostly.

After a slightly rocky first act that succumbs to thin generational differences, Brown allows his slow burn to catch fire and doesn’t look back. You may be regretting not being able to visit the beach this summer. Maybe it’s for the best.

St. Vincent is a piece of very well-made cheese, a movie in which one can feel its manipulations and heart-string pulling, but the talented ensemble makes those critical talking points easy to dismiss.

This is an old-fashioned hybrid of a thriller and a coming-of-age narrative that explodes when a fortune gets dropped into it. Think of it as an adolescent “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” with echoes of '80s adventure classics like "The Goonies" and "Stand by Me."

Can a film be too much and not enough at the same time? This is the conundrum of Ridley Scott's "Gladiator II," a movie bursting with just enough spectacle to keep it from being boring but, when you try to get anything out of it thematically, slips through your fingers like the sand in a warrior's hands.

After a year with too few action movies because of the shelving of the blockbuster, Nobody gives viewers an adrenalin rush that almost feels new again.

While the text of “Kinds of Kindness” is rich enough to unpack in thinkpieces and coffee house conversations, there is a sense that there hasn’t been as much careful consideration of how it all ties together as in some of his best films.

Is this a satire of the American Dream? A horror movie about how it became a nightmare? Or a comedy about a buffoon who basically stumbled into the men’s room on the right day? It seems unwilling to really answer these questions, content to substitute easy shots for difficult conversations about capitalism, politics, family, and marriage.