Jim Vorel

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.

A still somewhat convoluted wrap story that clarifies a few of the show’s bigger mysteries while indulging in a parade of series callbacks of varying quality.

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

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

There are few comedies in Hollywood history more universally beloved than the likes of Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, but perhaps the most impressive thing about that adoration is the fact that for many viewers it was earned without anything more than the barest conception of how effective a parody the film truly is.

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.

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.

At times arrestingly suspenseful, at others bitterly funny, but often inert in its transitions, Misericordia is an occasionally confounding mixed bag, but one that stands out for the realistic recriminations of a place where grievances run deep and mercy comes with strings attached.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Carry-On is good for a chuckle in fits and starts, primarily when dealing with the easily imagined workday horrors of dealing with irrational holiday travelers in a packed American airport, or the behind-the-scenes camaraderie of the TSA with their bingo cards for items such as confiscated drugs, weapons or embarrassing sex toys. There’s also a few well-executed action sequences.

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.

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.

For Zodiac Killer Project to work, it would have to be coming from a filmmaker who is fully ready to admit their own culpability in continuing to fuel the worst aspects of the genre they intended to exploit. That kind of brutal self-admission would have taken a great deal of courage, but Shackleton can’t quite get there, even if he comes close at times.

It’s directed and edited in totally competent fashion. But none of that justifies taking the time to watch an often tedious reworking of a story you’ve already seen so many times before.

With an incredibly deep and frankly excessive wealth of archival footage at its disposal, Perry examines filmic versions of the video store experience, drawing conclusions about what they meant to us, how filmmakers used them, and how we processed the end of the video store era.

Metrograph Pictures’ Gazer is effectively a neo-noir mystery, one with heavy 1980s and especially 1970s stylistic trappings, with elements of surrealistic horror dancing on the edges.

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.