Katie Rife

This could be entertaining in the right hands. Here, it just feels smug.

Although this is a story about innocence lost, the overwhelming impression left by “The Friend’s House is Here” is one of sweetness and hope.

At times, “Alpha” plays like a Cronenbergian after-school special, in which the visual metaphors are overplayed, and the drama is broadly sketched to teach a moral lesson.

Dead Lover is daring you to take it seriously, or perhaps distracting you with a goofy dance while it quietly queers the “Frankenstein” myth.

Grabinski’s writing style is goofy and (obviously) reference-heavy, and the jokes spray indiscriminately like so many bullets from an automatic weapon. The constant wisecracks get tiresome after a while, but not before introducing some clever gags and quotable quips.

McCarthy loses focus after this symphony of tightly controlled terror midway through the second act, adding a little too much backstory and a few too many scenes to the film’s denouement. Still, when Hokum works, it really works.

As a theatrical experience, it’s lots of fun, making clever use of proven techniques that build tension before releasing it with exploding light bulbs and ghostly figures appearing in the corner of the frame.

Dolly sets viewers up for an experience that it can’t quite deliver, mostly due to small acts of self-sabotage.

Pillion is a film about self-knowledge, and about asserting one’s needs and boundaries without shame.

Kikuchi’s strong, singular presence immerses the viewer in her character’s whimsical imagination and confusing emotions. She makes Haru a character worth rooting for — even, or perhaps especially, when she’s making all the wrong decisions.

Union County doesn’t completely bypass addiction-drama clichés. But its detailed, humanistic approach successfully creates a realistic world that supports its muted storytelling

The result is occult horror as potent as the snake venom in one of Selveig’s dreadful “cures.”

For a movie about stinking, bloated corpses, on the whole, this one is surprisingly fresh.

Mistress Dispeller” isn’t really about Wang, or her methods...It’s about the mysteries of the human heart. Its exploration of these subtle depths is sensitive, as are its conclusions.

Some movies suffer because of bad timing. Shell wouldn’t be a very good movie under any circumstances, but it fares especially poorly against Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, a better and more outrageous film that deals in very similar subject matter.

The overall effect is as if you fed a book of bawdy medieval verse to ChatGPT, which is perfectly in line with the film’s most provocative aspect.

A complaint that’s also common to contemporary horror films nags at The Black Phone 2, in that all of the best things about this movie come from other movies, whether they be the creative team’s previous efforts or iconic titles from decades past.

Ferreira is a believable and sympathetic protagonist, bringing a vulnerability to Grace that makes the viewer root for her even as she blows up her life for reasons even she doesn’t seem to understand.

Del Toro’s love for the grotesque and the abject is sincere and passionate, and there are scenes in Frankenstein that play like thesis statements for the director’s entire career.

Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie is so affable, so good-natured, so modest—just so gosh-darned charming—that it’s difficult not to crack at least a little bit of a smile while watching it.

Like a firecracker with a long fuse, Normal builds up, burns fast, makes a big noise, and then it’s gone.

Roofman is more of a slog than a romp, largely because of an extended 119-minute run time that still leaves many of its juiciest elements unexplored.

Pete Ohs’ best film yet.

One does not hire Bill Skarsgård unless one is looking for a lanky, off-putting weirdo. But Skarsgård does a good job of making his character’s frustration and rising panic grounded and relatable. This helps immensely when we get to the finale, which complicates the us-vs-them narrative.

If this sounds like American Sweatshop is trying to have it both ways, that’s because it is. It wants to titillate, and to judge. To show, and to tell. To enrage, and to pacify. Combined with the by-the-numbers direction and unremarkable cinematography, the overall effect is of an after-school special about how social media is bad for you — which it probably is, to be fair.

Saying that it makes these concepts “fun” or “accessible” is an overstatement, as “Harvest” can feel interminable even when a viewer is engaged with its ideas. But it does bring them to vivid, even bawdy, life.

Fear Street: Prom Queen fails to channel both the outrageous aesthetics and the brutal violence of the films it’s imitating, making this indifferently made exercise in YA horror supremely skippable.

Dead Mail’s quirkiness never grows tiresome, which is impressive.