Jim Vorel

For far too much of its bloated runtime, it becomes an incomprehensible slideshow of trauma and weakly executed horror imagery, only occasionally revealing the far more effective, character-driven psychological thriller it’s clearly yearning to be.

Ultimately, The Trouble with Jessica runs out of gas and limps in the direction of a contrived conclusion, lacking the mercurial spark that all its characters attribute to Jessica at one point or another. If only the experience of watching the film could be as engaging as the implied experience of knowing her.

Director Yeon Sang-ho, who staged genuinely tense sequences in the first film, just seems suddenly out of his element here when expected to produce a grander action spectacle.

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.

In truth, the entirety of Halloween Ends is suffused in some kind of magic or witchcraft, a gauzy layer of unreality that prevents a single character in the film from behaving like an actual human being.

The film needed to be either a dark, moody story about criminals seeking a way to break out of the ruinous track of their exploited lives, for the sake of a baby … or a winking, snarky heist comedy with a charismatic lead character. It instead tries to do both simultaneously, and the clash between those elements is distinctly awkward.

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

Back in Action functions modestly well as a welcome back to the screen for Cameron Diaz, who is still capable of being as charming today as she ever may have been. It even functions decently well as an action movie for the specific, too-narrow frames of time where Diaz and Foxx are thrashing wave after wave of nameless mooks–whoever the choreographer and stunt coordinators are here, they’ve done the heaviest lifting of anyone on the project. But the film feels absolutely threadbare in all other dimensions.

Rarely does it ever genuinely feel like a horror movie at all, in fact. Instead, it’s more like a halfhearted feminist kitchen drama, with the occasional “scary” beat inserted under protest, a horror film via technicality of labeling and marketing rather than any particular intent. It wants to be just about anything but.

Unfortunately, There’s Someone Inside Your House is a considerably more rote endeavor in mass-market horror filmmaking—competently shot and staged, but decidedly familiar, it displays none of the emotional nuance or attention to character detail we’ve associated with Brice in the past.

Any time Goodnight Mommy tiptoes toward the brink, there’s a hand waiting to yank it back toward mundanity.

All in all, The Parenting is just a notably scattershot affair, from its poorly defined character relationships, to its questionable pacing (and eventual abrupt ending), to CGI that sometimes looks fine and other times is suddenly and shockingly inept, like what I’d expect to see in a feature from The Asylum or Troma.

It’s just passable popcorn entertainment for a Friday night on the couch, and not on the same level as more inspired Netflix genre movies from the likes of Mike Flanagan, such as Hush or Gerald’s Game.

Leave it to a new version of I Know What You Did Last Summer to highlight that there was never anything particularly interesting about I Know What You Did Last Summer in the first place.

Like Green’s first 2018 Halloween reboot, this is a badly overstuffed film that largely ignores the inherent strength of what should be its central story—three generations of Strode women, facing down The Boogeyman—in favor of random, gratuitous action scenes and endless subplots.

Unfortunately, Fear Street: Prom Queen simultaneously goes out of its way to steal directly from all its major influences, demonstrating little if any original thought.

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.

A confused mashup of psychological imprisonment thrillers, dystopian social satire and even something adjacent to zombie horror, it’s bereft of actual ideas despite its cement mixer of a premise, struggling to pad out its runtime with 10 minutes of limping credits at its conclusion, leaving 83 minutes as a remainder that feels like a short film or anthology entry dragged kicking and screaming to feature length.

Despite an incredibly talented cast of top-tier comedy talent, the film fails to establish a cohesive comedic tone, becoming only more unmoored when it reaches for unearned emotional profundity later on.

Where The Pickup could have most easily have ideologically separated itself would have been on the comedic side, by leaning into the talents of its marquee names, but it instead represses the delivery of jokes more and more as it goes, becoming merely another tepid crime caper without a more distinct identity.

It’s easy to see why studio execs at Paramount were unsure of how to market this movie, as it seemingly attempts to check so many boxes at once that nearly any description is going to fail to accurately convey the experience of watching it. Ultimately, it’s that unstable, unpredictable nature that is simultaneously its most entertaining and most problematic aspect.

Like an unstable particle of antimatter–which beyond all reason becomes a major plot point, if you can believe that–Time Cut begins to rapidly deteriorate in legibility in its third act, before spinning totally out of control.

The criticism is less that Mute doesn’t know what it wants to be, and more that it seems to emphatically decide what it wants to be every few minutes, only to then change its mind once more. And every time it does so, it’s the audience that is being left behind.

Old Guy is a rather careless take on the fusion of comedy and action genres, the kind of film that will throw around an acronym like “PSNI” in the middle of conversation and just assume an American sitting at home on their couch will deduce this stands for “Police Service of Northern Ireland.”

The Electric State is one hell of an artistically neutered, sanitized boondoggle, awe-inspiring in its deployment of expensive visuals but largely bereft of any kind of genuine wit, humor, warmth or adaptational deftness.

No one escapes from this mess looking good, although to his credit, Ritchson is at least giving it a titanic effort.

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.

A visually sumptuous and evocative, but uneven feature.