Jim Vorel

The characters of Universal Language somehow leave you feeling better about humanity than you did before viewing it.

Yes; it stars a dog–but it’s also one of the year’s most potently unnerving and emotionally resonant horror films at the same time.

With a silly genre premise that could easily have been rendered as either an Asylum-esque B movie or a four minute SNL sequence, Sketch instead stands out as a triumph of movie-making chutzpah, an impressively confident and well-executed combination of family comedy, adventure, fantasy and even the occasional twist of horror and suspense.

A dark, percolating family drama that eventually takes a stunning turn into the savagely metaphorical, writer-director Alireza Khatami’s The Things You Kill proved to be one of the most impressive overall features at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

All in all, Vengeance Most Fowl casts a wide net–calculated as a return to the franchise that is clever enough for adults and charming and broad enough for kids, regardless of whether they have any familiarity at all with its characters.

Feverishly funny, gruesomely gross and unrelenting in its satirical critique of both beauty standards and the designation of a cinematic “protagonist,” director Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister is a film that will have jaws dropping at Sundance this year.

It’s fascinating and enlivening to watch how the fusion of two intensely familiar subgenres–serial killer thriller and shark-starring B-movie–can result in a work that is somehow brimming with life and verve.

Caterpillar is a stunning piece of documentary work, both for its incredible degree of access to both its central character and his journey, and its unconventional style of presentation, which skirts the boundaries of documentary and narrative feature.

Ultimately, the ambiguousness of the conclusion can’t really dim the engrossing and nigh-mystical sense of enrapturement that Meanwhile on Earth can project when it’s really firing on all cylinders.

Regardless of how you approach it, The Girl with the Needle remains an absolutely harrowing piece of historical horror, with an atmosphere of coldness and all-too-real misanthropy that captures a searing sense of truth.

Graceful and honest in its assessment of the frayed bonds of marriage and extended family, A Little Prayer thrives on a duo of beautifully rendered performances from David Strathairn and Jane Levy, brought together as two people seemingly meant to be in each other’s proximity–not as romantic partners, but as confidants of a nature that is almost more intimate in its own way.

This film is as good as this project could ever hope to be, and it bodes well that Part Two will live up to everything that’s been set up here. When granted the chance to see them back-to-back, we just may, as the song goes, all be changed for the better. After this first act, it’s already safe to claim that Wicked is frickin’ Oz-some.

A squirmy delight with real insight into both celebrity culture and exploitative relationships, it stands out as one of 2025’s most promising debuts.

The new feature, debuting on Shudder today, delivers no more and no less than what it promises: A deeply creepy, ultimately engrossing battle of wills between two phenomenal lead performers.

In a field full of would-be auteurs flailing against cliche and artistic malaise, Powell somehow manages to take a deeply familiar outline and breathe enough life and verve into it to truly stand out.

Where Predators becomes fascinating as a documentary is not in its rise-and-fall accounting of the titular series, however, but in the way it examines the evolution of empathy or vindictiveness in those who have been touched by abuse and tragedy.

Gorgeously shot and intellectually/emotionally provoking, the film tantalizes with transcendent revelations but is simultaneously unbalanced in how it approaches its characters and minimalist storytelling.

A highly subjective horror experience, Fréwaka rarely gives concrete answers as to the reality of what we’re seeing, but that never makes its potent imagery and outstanding performances any less effective.

Heartfelt, gently humorous and possessing a keen understanding of the passage from juvenile to adult thinking, it’s a thoughtful and solemnly beautiful feature debut.

As for the cinematic The Disaster Artist, outside of its magnificent central portrayal by the elder Franco, its strongest and occasionally most problematic elements revolve around the huge ensemble cast of familiar faces.

Kirk’s film is a surprisingly lyrical and quite gritty, intimate thriller, one that makes the best of its unorthodox choice of performers to tell a story that is equal parts tender and savage.

Theatre of Blood is a classic revenge story in the Grand Guignol tradition, following a single mastermind as he hunts down and messily dispatches all who have wronged him in ironic fashion.

The tone has more of the edgy, joyfully nihilistic streak present in something like Heathers. Tack on some legitimately brutal deaths, and you have a very effective modern black comedy/horror hybrid in the making, enhanced by an evocative score, crisp cinematography, lively camera and appropriately grungy soundtrack of early ‘90s classics.

What [Gandbhir] presents is stark, horrifying, and infuriating on multiple levels.

Together, these intersecting storylines yield more than enough funny, gross and surprisingly sweet moments to keep Freaky Tales chugging merrily along, even though it feels quite clearly calculated for the midnight festival crowd in particular.

The Damned gets by more than well enough via the elemental strength of its moral dilemma and the pristine beauty and unrelenting inhospitality of the Icelandic wilderness that is its scene-stealing star.

Categorizing Dead Mail is the exact sort of detective challenge faced by those sorting letters in the film’s post office dead letter unit: It’s a psychological aesthete crime story with occasional giallo tendencies, a film that will immediately become one of the strangest and most unconventional things on Shudder.

Visually, the film can be a bit rough around the edges, but at its heart it is built from the kind of pulpy sci-fi goodness that longtime series fans have likely been craving.