Henry Stewart

About a drug that sends its users back in time for seven minutes, the film holds your hand and walks you through its chronology mazes

This is a film that employs imaginative twists to illuminate the racism that’s entrenched in American history and society.

The character drama becomes afterthought as it’s superseded by action.

This a parable about adulthood boasts deeply cynical takes on home, community, and childrearing.

The film was almost canceled for being too partisan, so it’s ironic to discover that it’s practically apolitical.

It’s best appreciated not with the parts of your brain responsible for reason and judgment, but in the unthinking terror centers, where the film’s style of God-fearing fanaticism also resides.

The film’s tone is extremely eerie, with creeping camera movements, striking imagery, abrupt edits, and a delicately sinister score.

Patrick Lussier’s film is an incompetent, nihilistic exercise in gore and pseudophilosophy.

The film argues we’re stronger and better when we’re home, building communities that can oppress the oppressors and build up so-called “losers.”

Would that Jacob Estes had kept the particulars of his murder mystery as intricate as the sci-fi of his main characters’ communion.

Once it gets past what feels like submission to genre demands, the drama reaffirms its focus on the central themes.

In the end, the filmmakers settle for stigmatizing victimhood, abusing Sue Ann almost as much as her former tormentors.

Even though it’s not as tidily satisfying as Get Out, the new film is both darker and more ambitious, and broader in its themes.

Happy Death Day 2U pushes further than even matters of life and death into a realm in which stakes don’t even really apply anymore, concerned as it is not with how we live our best lives, but with how we can be the best possible versions of ourselves.

The filmmakers fail to realize that the darkest horror here doesn’t lie in the triumph of true evil, but in seeing how far a regular family will go to protect itself before doing the right and necessary thing, however hard or horrible it might be.

The Vanishing seems truly troubled by its action violence in a way that many similar thrillers aren’t.

When Ralph Breaks the Internet ignores the glittering marvels of the internet and focuses on the rapport between its two leads, it's deeply moving.

The film's victims are simply pawns in a super-gory bacchanal, which is aesthetically striking but emotionally dull.

The film moves evenly toward a conclusion that feels as inevitable as it does inescapable, while providing a plausible framework for the still-mysterious true crime.

Pierre Morel's first feature film set in the United States is brainless propaganda for the MAGA market.

Like the teenagers at its center, Hot Summer Nights tries too hard to look cooler than it ever could be.

The film is preposterously conceived, but writer-director Stephen Susco so tightly, excitingly executes it that you hardly notice.

Especially early on, Gerard McMurray often rejects the exhibitionist slaughter that James DeMonaco established as the Purge series’s modus operandi in favor of violence that’s rawer and realer.

There’s a lot of sexual violence in the film, but it scans as unimaginatively repulsive, as well as blatantly misogynistic.

Director Jeff Wadlow's Truth or Dare is a startlingly mean-spirited but otherwise dimwitted horror film.

Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead veer away from the deeper, even meta-cinematic, implications of their plotting.

Throughout, the film raises metaphysical issues of physical and psychological autonomy only to gloss over them.

Throughout, the film raises metaphysical issues of physical and psychological autonomy only to gloss over them, probably because addressing them could too quickly shut down the romance.