K. Austin Collins

His House is a strong debut, and exciting — even as its horrors risk redundancy as the film wears on — for its uncanny merging of political experience and the usual, perilous haunted-house thrills.

Carlota Pereda's debut feature, Piggy, takes horror’s revenge trope and twists it just so. It isn’t so simple as a much-abused underdog getting a freakish chance to get her payback and painting the landscape with her enemies’ dispatched blood and guts, though in this case, as in many cases, you might forgive her if she did.

Even when it seems at risk of spinning its wheels into oblivion, there’s an urgent pleasure in watching it spin.

The out-of-bodiness you feel from the filmmaking is almost more unsettling than the actual story. It’s pure cinematic dysmorphia: to watch this movie carefully is to feel completely out of place, right alongside the people onscreen.

What the movie’s effortful attempts at symbolism and meaning do most effectively are undercut what’s smart about the questions it raises — and DaCosta’s fine hand at creeping us out. The movie wants to be more than it is. The result is that it winds up amounting to less than it could have been.

The movie is too much, too long, but not lacking in its glories. To find them, follow Harley. She’s leading the way.

Eileen wants us to notice how the psychological brick house it’s been building all along explains the outcome. But the outcome almost doesn’t matter. The real joy is in the hungers we tasted along the way.

The promise of Shang-Chi, which is as much martial-arts movie as it is standard superhero origin fare, is that a lot of people will get their asses kicked: sometimes gracefully, even beautifully, and other times with the battering-ram power you can expect of a movie advertising 10 rings at play.

What’s dredged up by every bit of the film’s fabric and style is a sense of isolation.

It’s a fine movie: cute, clever, moving, and engagingly-told, an altogether painless confirmation of what we should all agree is Pixar’s basic aptitude for keeping kids’ asses in seats and parents from pulling out their hair.

An all pain, no gain, minimal-reprieve character study completely unaware of the ways its selling the singer short.

The documentary sees Ginsburg as an icon and hero first—and within that (I hesitate to say “second”) it sees her as the prodigious, idiosyncratic legal mind that she is. Somewhere in the process, rich contradictions and complexities get the slightest bit overlooked.

The charge that this film has the humble patina of a “TV movie”—an insult levied by critics and others at the time—is in fact perfectly apt. It explains the smallness of this production; it isn’t a stretch to say that the lack of crash-bang disaster theatrics might have something to do with the film’s budget. As it happens, Testament is all the better for this smallness. And, for me, all the more devastating.

See the movie for the performances and the concept — and watch it closely for the potential it contains, but doesn’t entirely exploit.

Sidney works as a tribute, or a beginner’s course. More probing questions about Poitier’s “meaning,” the impossibility of his position, the way it served as a measuring stick for taking stock of Black politics over many decades — these are problems bigger than, and largely beyond, this movie.

What’s missing is history. What’s missing is a sense that men like this really lived.

As a movie about the subjective fears of a woman on her own, being hunted or haunted by male violence both commonplace and supernaturally eerie, the movie basically works: Your heart races, you’re skeeved out, you’re crawling out of your skin. As a movie about why those men are the way they are, which is an idea that occupies a substantial chunk of its runtime, well…

The film falls prey to its own smoke and mirrors. It is less subversive than it aspires to be, and more emotionally real than than the filmmakers seem to realize.

God’s Creatures is a quiet movie, but its emotional drift is violent; Watson and Franciosi are particularly effective at giving us women being swept up into the currents.

The Dry is solid and appreciably sad but, for all the virtues of its rough symbolism and intriguing backstory, almost too jampacked with discovery for its own good.

It wants to be a slasher, but it isn’t reckless enough. It wants to be funny, but it only has two jokes, and it repeats them ad nauseum. It wants to be tense, but it takes advantage of almost none of the tension that this scenario and its McMansion setting have to offer.

Climax feels like what happens when a provocateur grows up. Noé, a nominally outré festival regular three decades into his career, is unmistakably washed. The jig is up, as of Climax, if not even earlier.

Fahrenheit 11/9 does what Moore has done best, or at least most, throughout his career. It’s a sprawling, big-mouthed, big-hearted mess of a polemic, equal parts righteously impassioned and unforgivably dubious. It’s a rip-roaring airing of grievances from a man who has only ever used his substantial platform to get shit off of his chest.

It’s not a knockout, but the actors frequently are. The rest is an exercise in not overdoing it. It’s here, it’s queer, it’s not much else — and that’s OK.

The Harder They Fall is a good piece of wish-fulfillment pop. It knows what it is. It’s accomplished enough not to be mistaken for what it isn’t trying to be.

The story, which is humbly well told and good-humored, if familiar, is enjoyable enough not to write the film off.

The First Purge is very clearly nonsense, and it’s not ashamed of that—nor should it be. Every so often, that nonsense stumbles into a surprising idea, a striking image, or something else worth clinging to when you leave the theater.

The movie has the makings of a devious erotic game, of a dirty pas-de-deux that spills out of the Van Allens’ marital bed and into a friend’s pool, a nearby quarry, and the woods. But the movie doesn’t quite have the backbone it’d need, or even the sense of fun, to clarify the extent to which this is a game that both players know they’re playing.