Jim Vorel

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.

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.

At the end of the day, Sweethearts just feels wan and inconsequential as a result of its lack of focus.

A visually sumptuous and evocative, but uneven feature.

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.

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.

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.

At the very least, it manages to remind us of how miraculous the commitment of human ingenuity can be, when it comes to making a new life possible.

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.

Credited to being “based on an original idea” from star Daisy Ridley, Magpie works in fits and starts as a portrait of an unbelievably, almost comically toxic marriage, but never aspires to really plumb the psyches of its characters or present them with anything but the most obvious and unchallenged choices.

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.

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.

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

In the end, The Apprentice is a story whose central character wouldn’t really justify the telling of said story in normal circumstances, except for the fact that he eventually became a ruinous president of the United States.

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.

The strong results of segments like “Stork,” “Live and Let Dive” and “Stowaway” buy the series a brief reprieve for now, but the yearly releases feel increasingly like a beast that will never be satiated.

We're presented with a mixed bag that feels emblematic of the series itself: Peaks and valleys have always been the norm.

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.

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.

What Scream VI ultimately lacks, on the other hand, is a clear sense of what it’s trying to say beyond the literal plot unfolding on screen.

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.

The feeling is one of depletion, as V/H/S/99 begins robbing past hits in a grim effort to keep itself mobile and vital.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.