Chase Hutchinson

The cruelty at the core of this vivacious vampiric farce is blended up with sharp yet silly gallows humor, ensuring the grim absurdities Larraín gracefully teases out increasingly take flight even as he continually drags us into gruesome and gory depths.

Riley, proving himself to be a romantic just as he is a believer in revolution, clearly not only loves these boosters with hearts of gold, but anyone that is trying to make it all work for themselves and those around them.

In the end, Bayona’s film takes us right into the heart of this story with clear-eyed focus and the necessary technical craft to make it work.

Even as it’s not Ramsay’s best film, even a minor work from the filmmaker is still better than just about any other director. There remains a haunting power that she’s able to wield over her audience.

When Late Night with the Devil casts off the tenuous bindings it is using to hold back chaos, it arrives at something more frightfully fun.

It lacks the electricity of his past works but, as we come to see, the lifelessness of it all, is, in many regards, the point of the whole thing. It's about carrying on when nothing makes sense.

For all the promise of its main cast and sturdy thriller premise, The Menu is a work that seems destined to slip from your mind.

It makes for an entertaining watch in which the attention to detail in every technical element helps smooth over the scattered and superficial story’s many residual shortcomings.

It’s the least Charli XCX movie yet, with her disappearing into her role so completely that it's often breathtaking to witness, but it's also the one that marks her arrival as an essential voice.

It is by no means a perfectly constructed work, but there is something more immense in its thematic aspiration that provides plenty for Pugh to play around with. All that makes it unwieldy also makes The Wonder mesmerizing so that, even when the spell is broken, you can’t shake it from your mind.

As a complete portrait of youth on the cusp of the rest of their lives, it never manages to be authentically sharp enough to transcend the more tiresome narrative trappings it falls into and a grating over reliance on musical cues as punchlines.

There is a good film in The Harbinger that we catch glimpses of in moments of horror and the conversations we do get to see play out. It just is struggling to break through the uncertain confines of the story it is trapped in.

It’s a film where every detail of the craft is worth taking in even when the story starts to lose steam a bit towards the end.

While far more grim than one might expect, and miles away from being a straight crowd-pleaser, it proves Patel is a force to be reckoned with, not only as an action star but as someone with skill behind the camera.

Even as it comes awfully close to overstaying its welcome just a bit, much like the spiders in the home of the characters, it very quickly grows on you.

Though the ending is somewhat disappointing and less dynamic than everything that preceded it, this can’t take away all that the film still has going for it.

Throughout it all, Hawke is mesmerizing. The action scenes are tense and well-executed, though it’s the way he grounds it that makes you feel every setback.

After the Bite could initially be mistaken for just another part of a trajectory of movies that has become defined by this trend-chasing rather than something more. However, if you begin to look closer, you’ll discover a measured reflection on our relationship to both the predator of the deep and the habitat that has come under threat.

It’s far from perfect and is at its brutal best in the final stretch, though it manages to get there in mostly one piece — even when its characters do not.

It is enigmatic and eerie in a manner that crawls under your skin until you feel like you can't escape it. It is proof that films like this, even as they are enormously painful, can reveal the dark truths of being alive in ways other works shy away from. It reflects how life can often have no respite from tragedy, instead burrowing deeper and deeper into it. It succeeds in capturing this state of being, meticulously and ruthlessly ripping away the past until the future comes crashing down.

Hope, the all-time great new action film from writer-director Na Hong-jin, is a glorious genre romp that contains more magnificent moments in its opening act than most do in their entire runtime.

There are plenty of silly recurring jokes and a collection of quirky characters, but it all exists to cover up just how empty the film itself is at its core.

There will always be much to the film that is too distant, but the moments where Stolevski pulls us in closer make its portrait of passion resonate where it counts.

It is a work that is so caught up in the noise that it drowns out the moments of the profound silence that could have spoken to something more.

When it all comes together, Wendell & Wild ends up feeling liberating, both artistically and thematically, with top work from all involved.

What makes this latest documentary from director Peter Nicks different is how it takes time to sit with the failures and go just a bit deeper.

A thriller that starts solidly enough and picks up steam before blowing the doors off with an outstanding ending, Magpie is one of those rare films that feels both fresh and alive while building off classic genre works of the past.

It has a lot on its mind that it wants to tackle, but that leaves much of the explorations it is undertaking feeling half-baked. This doesn’t drag things down too much, as it is mostly able to keep light on its feet, but it does make things a bit wobbly.