Brian Tallerico

It’s a movie that finds most of its power through silence—the proud and yet pained look Tucci gives to Firth during that speech will stick with me for a long time.

It’s a movie that's constantly on the verge of developing into something as intense and haunting as writer/director John Lee Hancock wants it to be, but it never achieves its goals, especially in its final half-hour. Some of the major stuff here works, including a performance from Washington that’s better than the movie around it (yet again), some striking L.A. cinematography, and an effective score, but one could say that it’s the little things that hold it back. A few big things too.

Yes, it’s relatively predictable and arguably a little thin in terms of ambition, but it’s also refined and nuanced in ways that these films often aren’t. Everyone here is at the top of their craft from the character actors who populate the ensemble to the two leads at its center to everyone behind the camera, and you can feel that from first frame to last.

There’s a better version of Hunted that either leans more into its surreal flights of fancy or settles into gritty, tense realism. Hunted gets caught in the middle.

The Empty Man draws comparisons to junky studio fare like “The Bye Bye Man” and “Slender Man” but this is a far more ambitious and accomplished piece of work than its reputation.

Ultimately, Museum Town is a loving tribute that misses some opportunities but also fully represents the unpredictability of life.

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.

The truth is that even if one sets aside all potential moral arguments about the very existence of "Songbird," it's still just really bad. If you're going to make a movie this exploitative and gross, you really have to make it better to disguise the smell of it all.

Even as the final act starts to get a bit manipulative by stretching some previously established realism, Mikkelsen holds it together, and then he comes out literally swinging in one of the best final scenes of the year. It’s such a jubilant moment that you may walk out of the theater feeling a little buzzed.

The Godfather Coda does seem different, thanks largely to how he opens and closes the film. Overall, this version feels even more elegiac—a true coda instead of just another part of the same story.

It’s a wonderful film to experience as an acting and filmmaking exercise. Just take the trip.

He’s a welcome presence in his first on-screen performance since 2016, but Clooney’s direction is as cold as the landscape his character travels, never once finding anything that feels organic or character-driven. It looks good. It sounds great. It’s as hollow as can be.

By turning this narrative into a search for an identification that seems increasingly unlikely to ever happen, Dower loses focus, and we become just as lost as the hundreds of people convinced they know what happened to D.B. Cooper.

A decent first half and solid voice work throughout succumbs to total chaos for the second half and the realization that there’s almost no actual artistic intent here. No story, no character, no world-building, no design. It’s all bright colors and loud noises. You’d think we’d evolved beyond that by now.

It’s a movie that doesn’t just allow for silence but thrives in it, with Ahmed’s eyes and body language charting the arc of his character. He doesn't miss a beat.

The result is a film that can be a bit dry when Oppenheimer leads the scientific discussion but that comes springing back to life when Herzog the filmmaker allows his awe to come through the camera.

At its best, it’s self-aware in a way that’s reminiscent of the ‘90s slasher renaissance in films like “Scream” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer.”

With the exception of a few strong sequences in the scare department, it’s an inconsistent, flat film that is too often reliant on jump scares instead of atmosphere.

This is a film that so blatantly cribs from other popular works that it never develops a personality of its own.

Some of the writing gets a bit clunky, the ending is pretty horrible, and there’s a performance at the center that kind of sucks in everything around it like a black hole, but most of that won’t matter to viewers of The Witches: They’ll be too scared to care.

It has a reasonably strong lead performance for micro-budget horror, but writer/director Jeffrey Reddick can’t come through with the thrills, resorting to cheap jump scares to hide shoddy editing, low-grade cinematography, and the kind of clunky storytelling that’s more reminiscent of a Creepypasta tale than a feature film.

More than just your standard horror/comedy, The Wolf of Snow Hollow is a tonal balancing act, a movie that doesn’t go for laughs or horror as much as weave various tones and styles through its excellent script. I thought Cummings was a talent to watch after “Thunder Road,” and now I’m sure of it.

Its abundance of plot contrivances in the final act and overly scripted dialogue hold it back from greatness, but two excellent performers overcome all of this familiarity. I can't want to see them again.

While it may seem unfair to compare an adaptation to its excellent source, the creators here lay down that gauntlet right from the beginning, and then fail to meet their own standard.

Hubie Halloween is just generally entertaining enough to be harmless, while also being the kind of movie that people will have trouble remembering exists by the time he makes “Tommy Thanksgiving”.

That’s all you’ll get in Death of Me, a movie that takes a fresh idea and decides that the best way to present it is through tropes and clichés from better films.

The optimistic, twisting core of what 2067 is about will keep genre fans engaged even as the increasingly bad performances and frustrating writing pushes them away at the same time.

The result is a film that feels deeply personal, and not always in a good way. It’s a film that can’t help but feel a little like an invasion of privacy.