Jim Vorel

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.

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 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.

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

Ultimately, Borderline’s various threads threaten to unravel, but it succeeds in making a point about delusion and both unrealistic expectations and the lies we tell ourselves to make it through the day.

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.

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.

At such a brisk pace, I Really Love My Husband makes its point with admirable swiftness and sharpness, becoming an often quite funny tragicomedy of romantic disaster, illustrative of what happens when two people with deeply unrealistic expectations collide and rely upon a lack of communication to avoid conflict.

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.

Lovers of classical opera will no doubt find it to be a sumptuous treat.

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.

As writer, Woody Bess seems to want to drag more weighty pathos into a format that doesn’t inherently support it very well, and it ends up hurting both the film’s dramatic and comic deliveries at the same time, rendering its performances confused, with the exception of veterans like Keith David and Richard Kind.

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.”

In Rounding, you can see the basic outline of a worthy psychological drama, but its screenplay fails to turn that vague shape into a fleshed-out story, instead relying on the viewer to fill in the gaps, while the horror elements merely detract from the material that might have worked otherwise.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Jharrel Jerome gives his all, but without a screenplay to stand on, balance is impossible.

The Prosecutor is often at odds with itself, but is saved by the sheer, bravura intensity of its superior action thriller side.

Extremely Unique Dynamic is stream-of-consciousness comedy, feeling every bit like something that was filmed over the course of five days, as was reportedly the shooting schedule.

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, 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.