Gregory Nussen

Ultimately, Over Your Dead Body is too messy for its own good. It is unable to settle into any one choice. The repeated motif of flashbacks and plot twists is fun, but not always useful in keeping the ball up.

The film boasts a twee quirkiness in style, but in its narrative, that promise never really comes to fruition. It is, in other words, a much more normal affair than what is promised. In spite of many genuine laughs, that just translates into a disappointing experience.

In between nonchalant murders, Beers, Bacon, and Sedgwick aim for grounded heart-to-heart conversations of a kind that don't exactly feel at home in the movie's otherwise topsy-turvy world. But being that this is a real family that has worked together for decades, their chemistry elevates the somewhat lackluster writing to deliver a pleasurable, if tame experience.

If Ready or Not was a chess match, Here I Come is tic-tac-toe.

Perhaps it's fitting that a horror film set around a podcast flits in and out of being engaging, since that's more or less the experience of listening to one, but it doesn't exactly make for a cohesive viewing experience.

To put it simply: it's just not very stimulating to watch two people who have a hard time talking... have a hard time talking. Stella and Gerry's love may be stuck in the wintry cold, but so is the film, utterly unable to be thawed.

Every life is a universe unto itself, and Ricciardi was clearly the kind of unique soul whose spirit enriched everyone around him, but its actually in the margins of this sometimes preening doc that Benna's film really hits its target. When the film rests, it destigmatizes a process that everyone will eventually go through (albeit in a range of ways).

Despite a series of beautiful gowns worn by Chastain, the film doesn't offer much intrigue nor sociopolitical interest, instead reducing itself to the lowest common denominator by the time it reaches its exceedingly cruel ending.

A surprisingly bland film that somehow manages to dampen even Glen Powell's usual brand of effortless charm, How to Make a Killing is sketched together with thin characterizations, limp commentary and a sluggish pace.

It's to the actors' credit that it works when it does, and what it ultimately posits about marriage is as grossly haunting as it is disturbingly poetic.

Lang really goes for it here, and he sells the material as best as he can, but suffice it to say that Hellfire is only as entertaining as your bandwidth for bog-standard action fare.

This is a purposefully languid movie that proves real, genuine tension can be built without crash landing right on your head. In an era of fast cuts and escalating explosions — the kind that Hemsworth, Ruffalo and Halle Berry all know intimately from their time in Marvel's universe — it is refreshing to watch something this confident in its own particular DNA.

What they cannot ignore is that the film is otherwise still lacking. For all the epithets one could throw out about Wuthering Heights, the most surprising may be that it is an abject snooze, and that its nonchalance about color-specific casting reveals a filmmaker completely insensitive to the implications of race in the late 18th century.

If American Pachuco leaves you wanting more, perhaps that's not a bad thing; Valdez deserves the last word, anyway, and he's not finished.

Its approach is so diffuse that its uncertain and purposefully ambiguous ending is misguided at best.

It's a standard-bearer film, a real fastball down the middle, which hits all of its assumed itinerant emotional beats right on target, without ever really challenging us in any major way.

The Gallerist is a tepid satire. Even calling it such feels generous, as the film is almost entirely devoid of genuine humor.

Candy-colored and ebullient, I Want Your Sex is not a bad film, but its hard to think of it positively when we know just how much more effective Araki has been behind the camera. The film is just never sure of what it is.

Waugh knows how to build an action sequence with the best of them, and Shelter is, ultimately, an electric actioner, so long as it is sticking to the action.

The circumstances around Audrey and Eli's union (Moon Choi and Son Suk-ku, respectively) is tender, yet forceful, beautiful, yet pained; but the film is otherwise formless, uninspiring and moves like molasses.

The best parts of Mother of Flies are in the margins. At its most lucid, it tells us that life, death and healing are magic — both of the Western and witchy varieties.

No disrespect to Foy, who showed with The Crown just how capable she is of revealing entire histories through her open visage, but watching her go through the extremely repetitious (and, one supposes, accurate) steps of training a Eurasian Goshawk is exceptionally tiresome. H is for Hawk induces the same effect as taking a sedative.

The process of searching through all manner of cloud-based applications and information in a video-game-like manner is a tantalizing prospect, one just wishes it wasn't done for something so harebrained.

In implicit ways, Deepfaking Sam Altman demonstrates just how out of touch from basic humanity these programs still are, which makes it all the more terrifying when we hear how they are being peddled as tools which can literally decide the fate of human lives.

ALL YOU NEED IS KILL is not a film that'll have you scratching your head for meaning. It wears its empathy and its plea for life on its sleeve like a badge of honor. Admirable though that is, that directness does translate into threadbare writing.

Shuffle is a solid primer for a massive subject, and Flaherty's approach is a maddening introduction to a world that needs massive reform.

After its more interesting first hour, the intimate access gets tiresome, and it's hard to say what is gained by being introduced to the personal lives of the members of a notorious hate group.

Overall, the pulpier and the dumber it gets, Primate provides a pretty good reason to get to the theater in January. And, it gets pretty pulpy and dumb indeed.