Jim Vorel

At its most powerful, The Twister is remarkable for the brief moments it captures that are so rarely reflected in an accurate way.

At times, Armand threatens to lose itself entirely in the fever dream it conjures, like the film itself is going to reach its combustion point and ignite, but it gets just enough of its disquieting atmosphere across to lodge in the memory all the same.

Handsomely odd and yet evocative of universal adolescent experiences, Boys Go to Jupiter trades in familiar coming-of-age sentiment, but looks like no other film you’ve ever seen in doing it.

Havoc doesn’t lack for recognizable faces for the American market, not with Tom Hardy, Timothy Olyphant and Forest Whitaker front and center. But it’s also not really interested in giving those performers real roles to chew on. Rather, Havoc is primarily a canvas for Evans to paint in bullet holes and viscera, delivering wave after wave of hilariously over-the-top, comic overkill, at least in its back half.

What Mad Heidi has is some genuinely impressive production design, beautiful landscapes, solid performances and a setting that is fresh and novel for this kind of neo-exploitation angle.

Don’t Die offers an engrossing window into the mania of a unique individual, one with the outlandish resources to do something that no normal person would even be able to dream about attempting.

All in all, Get Away becomes surprisingly effective by the time all is said and done, bleakly satirical, bloody and a far cry better than the trite parody of director Steffen Haars other 2024 collaboration with Nick Frost, Krazy House.

Deeply silly but more narratively ambitious than one would likely expect, it’s bursting (honestly overstuffed) with ideas and cinematic verve, taking advantage of a slightly longer runtime to really venture into increasingly bonkers metaphysical territory as it draws on and creates new cinematic tropes for movies about witches.

This is a startlingly creative and skillfully assembled little movie–one that eventually overreaches to some degree, but as a viewer you wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. The ambition of its filmmakers to reach well beyond their meager resources is as inspiring as the film is creepily unsettling.

It’s tough to watch Secret Mall Apartment and not fall under the spell of Townsend and his earnest collaborators, possessing as they do the idealism and righteous conviction of young people in a bygone era who are quite certain that they’re going to change the world.

At times, By Design is agonizingly opaque or borderline insufferable in its pretentious indulgences; at other times it’s laugh-out-loud funny as it skewers equally pretentious targets.

This is a confidently directed and visualized debut with a strong central performance, albeit one not fully supported by its screenplay.

The Witch this is not, but that’s ultimately fine—although the themes may be something like a mash-up of The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible, the tone has a much more pop mentality that is at least consistent throughout.

A visually sumptuous and evocative, but uneven feature.

Anyone nostalgic for their grandmother’s cooking will no doubt feel its inexorable pull toward the kitchen.

This is a daring, unsettling, inscrutable and at times deeply boring venture into the farthest boundaries of horror esotericism, utterly unlike anything that most viewers will have ever seen before.

Even with a bit of a dip in “Kidprint,” V/H/S/Halloween registers as one of the series’ strongest recent efforts, buoyed by the joyfully demented humor and explosive bloodletting of “Diet Phantasma,” “Fun Size” and “Home Haunt” in particular.

River of Grass is perhaps best described as lightly informative in its tribute to Florida’s vast Everglades and the influence of pioneering ecologist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, more influenced instead by a desire to stir the viewer emotionally and soulfully, to invite them into the bewitching, intoxicatingly thick air of a place where life teems in every direction you could think to look.

It’s to the film’s credit that its writer-director resists pretty much every one of those conventional impulses, steering his breezy but meandering story in unexpected directions, letting it simply develop into a character portrait of two emotionally polarized individuals.

Mountainhead promises and delivers a takedown of those tech bros who now rule our society, although there are few genuinely schadenfreude-derived smiles to be had in the exercise.

Street Trash is having a blast as it turns most of its characters into puddles of goo, and that’s all you can really ask of it.

Put simply, V/H/S/94 is almost less an anthology than it is a vehicle for a single, deliriously creative segment from director Timo Tjahjanto, which dominates the entire center of the film. All the other segments simply orbit this central anchor, caught in the inexorable pull of Tjahjanto’s demented imagination, which manages to give V/H/S/94 at least 30 minutes in which one cannot look away.

Don’t Move’s protagonist may be rendered inert, but the film retains just enough energy and menace to spare.

More than anything, it functions as a powerful encapsulation of the death of innocence in youth; a distillation of the moments when we come to terms with the realization that our parents may not be the valorous outlines we’ve built them up to be.

Destined to be divisive, it’s a piece of modestly indulgent arthouse horror that is equal parts bewitching and belabored, but at least it has the good instinct to trim itself to a short runtime that doesn’t allow it to become genuinely grating.

Frankenstein Created Woman is an entertaining aberration in a series of films that have a tendency to run together somewhat, combining beloved tropes of the format–the laboratory sets and sci-fi rigmarole have never looked better than here–with a fresh take on this particular brand of mad science, which sees the title character looking inward, toward the primordial origins of what makes us human.

[Black] hands us a frenzied combination of action, comedy and criminal caper, patently absurd but well served by knowingly silly performances and solid jokes.

There’s little here for the casual horror fan, but genre completionists will likely find something that sticks with them.