Jared Mobarak

All mood, atmosphere, and mystery with our own confusion about the action mirrored in those onscreen.

These two couples are literally here to be targets and are thus more frustrating than not whenever they unsurprisingly escape the multiple harrowing moments of homicidal fun.

Loving Pablo had the opportunity of making Virginia Vallejo its star. It should have pushed Escobar to the background so Bardem could shine as a villain-in-waiting instead being gifted the spotlight.

I don’t think John Ridley’s Needle in a Timestack (adapted from the short story by Robert Silverberg) quite reaches the full potential of its conceit, but it comes close while overcoming any early preconceptions.

With some acting that leaves us wanting and the excruciatingly slow reveals of gore to fool us into thinking we experienced impact and not aftermath at the start, Kitamura must use everything at his disposal to lead us into the high stakes arena of predator and prey.

Bad Education is a roller coaster ride from start to finish as the surface sheen of success is peeled back to reveal the proverbial bodies buried to achieve it.

Perhaps that’s the point: selfish men do selfish things while the people they love pay the price. That’s a lesson. And it might have worked if not for the sunny, hopeful air of its surrounding package. South of Heaven isn’t dark enough to buy that as its intent.

Despite the filmmakers investing so much time in unnecessary biopic exposition, the whole is an exciting and informative history lesson.

The Immaculate Room isn’t breaking the mold on this type of conceit; if anything it’s purposely embracing a narrow scope of mental fracturing the scenario can ignite and counting on the actors to make it compelling.

With an unhinged Weaving chewing the scenery as Nix and a perfectly cast Radcliffe doing his best to survive while also finding it impossible to keep Miles’ snarky thoughts in his brain out of his mouth, it’s hard not to be entertained.

Despite the underlying emotional complexity shared via triggered vignettes of memory, the film too often chooses to live in the present and thus within the love triangle it so desperately wants to subvert.

Unfortunately the truth of The 9th Life of Louis Drax quickly becomes evident because there aren’t many suspects. Once irrefutable facts come to light, common sense dictates what’s going on.

At the end of the day this is a hollowly reductive account of what happened with a weird subtextual rich punk against blue collar cop agenda falling woefully flat.

What should be tender and whimsical feels repetitive and off-putting.

Gossling populates this little town with so many horrible people that you assume the tornadoes are coming to purge them from society. It’s therefore somewhat jarring when she lets impending tragedy provide them redemption instead.

Milburn does the right thing as far as keeping a nihilistic tone for his conclusion, but it lacks the teeth to get us holding our breath. We restlessly await our own escape instead since we already suffocated about forty minutes prior.

Thankfully Bousman’s endgame does deliver the supernatural slaughterhouse of the title to great effect with inspired spectral victims looped in suspended animation. It’s so memorably jarring that you wonder if the whole was just sloppily reverse engineered from this massive undertaking.

Kruger and Nyong’o elevate the material to a level it probably doesn’t deserve with Chastain and Cruz following closely behind.

Level Up feels familiar without boring us because we’re unsure how Matt will get out of his next predicament devoid of the skillset necessary to fight his way through.

He’s taking themes he’s seen countless times over and playing with them to earn laughs that hit as much upon the joke as they do the clichéd situations in which they occur. Landis embraces those contrivances and uses them to his advantage.

Braun and Martin make some interesting choices and craft a gorgeous-looking film on an obviously shoestring budget, but none of that matters when my one wish was for these characters to never see each other again.

The film’s simply a bit off-kilter—written with influences blatantly on its sleeves yet uninterested in subverting any assumptions that fact guarantees. I must be missing something.

While Avnet’s film is effective melodrama, it’s hardly a completely honest depiction of what happened.

Libatique isn’t messing around and his involvement is proof that the movie shouldn’t be dismissed. The cinematography got my attention and Pelé’s artistry (re-enacted or not) earned my emotional investment.

On its most superficial horror flick level, Jay Baruchel’s latest directorial effort Random Acts of Violence works