Brian Tallerico

It is a relentlessly brutal movie, one that too quickly becomes monotonous in its cruelty, numbing instead of thrilling viewers.

If all of the dots don’t connect, that feels almost intentional, a way to create a personal connection with the viewer that may be different than anyone else’s. Some will struggle with the lack of cohesion; for others, it will be the best thing about “Mother Mary.” Both are right. And so is Mother Mary when she says these metaphors are exhausting. More movies should be exhausting.

Admittedly, “Noah Kahan: Out of Body” will play better to fans of the subject’s music, but it works as well as it does because it refuses to just be fan service, choosing instead to really capture the complexity of how fame doesn’t alleviate things like anxiety, sometimes even feeding that internal beast.

What “Scream 7” should have or at least could have been, “Faces of Death” effectively digs deeper into the themes that the Ghostface franchise has only been flirting with recently, particularly the impact of becoming not just numb to online violence but weaponized by it.

It’s a film that struggles to maintain its nightmare grip on the viewer as the repetition becomes more numbing than entrancing.

Its worst sin isn’t its stupid characters doing stupid things; it’s that the whole thing feels remarkably lazy, failing to find any tension or even B-movie thrills. You can insult my intelligence within the world of a film, but not in the actual filmmaking, if that makes sense. This movie sure doesn’t.

Chime is yet another reminder that Kurosawa is one of the world’s masters when it comes to unpacking the remarkably fragile line between good and evil.

There are times when what should be escapism approaches “Hostel” levels of viciousness, just one of the many issues with a film that seems incapable of settling on a tone.

Hokum rises above so many films like it because it takes its character’s plight seriously, never winking at the audience, even as the impossible happens.

It’s a sporadically fun movie with obvious influences, but it also lacks in stakes and personality, getting repetitive long before it ends.

Everyone here understands how to thread that needle of being broadly goofy while also keeping the film from turning into a parody. It’s a comedy that’s consistently displays its eccentric personality but rarely feels like it’s desperately pushing a punchline for a laugh.

The Lonely Island brand of humor might at first seem like an awkward fit for horror, but there’s an art to the timing of a well-done splatter flick that shares filmmaking DNA with comedy.

It helps a great deal to have a wickedly fun ensemble ready to play this murderous game, led once again by a physical, engaged, immediate performance from Samara Weaving.

Riley understands that satire can embed messaging in the whimsy. You’ll walk out of this one feeling boosted.

Genuinely inept in every way, “Scream 7” is far and away the worst of the franchise, a shallow rendering of things that worked better in other films.

Sadly, “Dreams” never figures out what it wants to say, and what it does convey is done with so little affect or pulse that it almost feels like an intentional choice to tell a “hot” story in as “cool” a way as possible.

It’s wrapped in an original, funny piece of entertainment, but this is also undeniably a warning.

It’s a narratively simple film that has been interpreted differently by dozens of critics since its Cannes premiere last May, but it’s one that is impossible for this critic to shake, a reminder of what movies can do when they loosen the restraints of traditional narrative and remember that images are meant to evoke as much as they are to explain.

The third chapter is better than the middle one by virtue of having at least a few new ideas and one less CGI wild boar, but it’s still a shapeless mess, a movie that might have worked as the final act of one film.

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.

While it looks beautiful, and Thomas Newman’s score does a lot of heavy lifting given the lack of dialogue, there needed to be more actual storytelling beyond a few key beats of new life and tragic death.

These moments have a tactile intimacy that’s incredibly powerful, placing these ordinary people in an almost timeless continuum of seemingly ordinary behavior that becomes extraordinary in memory, or through the eyes of a camera.

Joe Carnahan, the director of gritty cop flicks like “Narc” and “Copshop,” is back in his wheelhouse with the effectively entertaining The Rip, the rare Netflix original action film that actually plays like something you’d want to see in theaters.

There’s something so rewarding about going to a movie and giving yourself over to a master like Park Chan-wook, someone whom you trust through all the twists and turns of a film as tonally complex as No Other Choice. It’s so easy to see all of the places where this unique gem could have gone wrong, and so satisfying to see it only make good choices from beginning to end.

Great sequels don’t just repeat, they build. This one treads beautifully-rendered water.

So much of “Influencers” works as well as it does because of Harder’s cleverly unpredictable and often remarkably funny script.

It’s not just another ghost story; it’s a story of malevolence that happens to be told through home recordings, YouTube clips, and CCTV footage. Hall and Gandersman play a little fast and loose with their genre—as so many of these movies do—but it’s forgivable given the pace they maintain in their blissfully short film (under 90 minutes with credits).

Safdie’s daring choices merge with the best performance of Timothee Chalamet’s career for a story of a man who thinks he’s the best in the world at something, and that thinking is as important as actually being it.