Katie Rife

Violation is not a movie one can casually recommend, and even aficionados of the horror genre may find it off-putting in its extreme violence or its grandiose self-seriousness. Perhaps the best way to think of this film is as a ritual, a transgressive act of dark magic that manifests all the slimy, sinister creatures crawling along the underside of more straightforward revenge narratives. You can’t banish a demon without conjuring it first.

Viewers who are looking for something thought-provoking as well as thrilling have come to the right place.

Thanks to all this brittle emotion, Hvistendahl’s film is absorbing, even captivating at times. But it moves at a pace that can be charitably described as “measured.”

Once it gets out of its own way and gives the audience what they came to see, Evil Dead Rise is an absolute blast.

While Pennywise is legitimately terrifying, overall, It is more intense than it is chilling.

Feldstein is as contagiously ebullient as always in the role, and her English accent is mostly passable, although it breaks down at times during the voiceovers that bookend the film. But her character’s actions keep chipping away at the actor’s natural charisma.

It uses a thin plot touching on the classic Hong Kong action themes of brotherhood and loyalty as an excuse to string together a series of gonzo action set-pieces so ingeniously bloody that one could conceivably classify the film as horror.

Breaux is able to wring great pathos out of the character of Adam with very few words, which only makes Henry and Polidori’s arguments about ethics, which increase in frequency as the film goes on, seem all the more tedious.

Always in control of its deeply bizarre, suburban surrealist tone, even when its story is more like a series of comedy sketches than a feature film.

If you took "Harry Potter," put it in a paper bag with "The Wire," and shook it vigorously, you’d get the basic idea behind Selah And The Spades — a film that, to its credit, is only partially defined by those two elements.

The Mortuary Collection recalls everything from Hammer Horror to Sam Raimi at various points throughout the film. It’s less successful at actually transcending those influences, although Spindell’s devotion is endearing.

There’s nothing especially revelatory about the scenes where Anette sits in the country home that now feels more like a prison, wondering how her life got to the point . . . But her response to said feminine mystique is demented enough to make this a wild and satisfying ride.

Gerbase, making an impressive feature debut, proves herself a sensitive observer of human nature. The Pink Cloud joins a tradition of sci-fi films like Her that are less interested in their futuristic concepts than how they might affect people.

I Used To Go Here would rather be painfully relatable than cutting.

Sadly, despite a compelling lead and strong craft behind the camera—the color palette, in shades of lavender, pink, teal, and gray, is capably chosen and very of the moment—Smile is diminished by the sheer fact that it’s not as fresh a concept as it might seem.

While the film’s time-loop premise does engage with the usual themes of appreciating every moment and the preciousness of life, it also ties the concept to the scientific method in a way that feels fresh and interesting.

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.

The story is absolutely fascinating, even if the filmmaking isn’t.

The latest film from The Ritual’s David Bruckner seems to have forgotten that it’s supposed to be a horror movie first and a metaphor second.

Two of the segments reflect Corman’s admitted weariness with the material, but the middle segment, The Black Cat, turns a hybrid of Poe’s stories The Black Cat and The Cask Of Amontillado into a winking romp through the campy side of Gothic horror.

Radcliffe’s performance also ramps up toward the end of the movie, when the pressures of undercover life and his struggle to empathize with these people — his main asset as an undercover agent — really begin to weigh on him.

Luckily, Morales and Duplass have the chemistry and the acting chops to carry this unexpectedly moving film.

It’s another portrayal of mental illness that keeps My Friend Dahmer from fully immersing viewers in its reality.

An amiable crime dramedy from a more under-the-radar pair of filmmaking brothers, Ian and Eshom Nelms.

The film is consistently beautiful to look at in an “industrial metal album cover” kind of way, pairing dimly lit, black-and-white cinematography and artfully composed mise-en-scéne.

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.

It’s a little corny at times, but it looks good and has heart—and, let’s be honest, Black cowboys are pretty damn cool.

It’s a more cynical, and arguably more realistic, depiction of the unique malignancies of fame than this year’s other Oscar-baiting pop musical, "A Star Is Born." But ultimately, it’s no more insightful.

Despite its bolder choices, however, Fresh doesn’t push the body horror as far as it could, and works better as an empowerment fable than as an actual thriller.

This is a film fueled by writing and performance. Writer Micah Bloomberg’s script ingeniously incorporates the movie’s themes into its structure, and Qualley and Abbott—but especially Qualley—playfully keep the audience guessing throughout.

The film will continue to defy your expectations.

If one of the boundaries being tested in this film is viewers’ patience, the reward for—to use a refrain repeated throughout the film—“trusting the darkness” is well worth the commitment.

Whannell strikes out on his own with his first truly original concept as a writer-director...in a film whose production is as ambitious as its story is formulaic. Thankfully, the former mostly compensates for the latter, making Upgrade a genre-bending summer treat for those who don’t mind a little (okay, a lot) of blood with their popcorn.

As a filmmaker, Flanagan deals in raw, go-for-broke emotion; it’s just that this time around, he’s using that passion to affirm the audience, not disturb them.

Starts off strong but dilutes its impact with every consecutive reveal.

As one might expect, much of the responsibility for keeping Oxygen compelling rests on Laurent, who runs through all the stages of grief, from denial to acceptance, as she thrashes against her high-tech prison. She’s supported by ingenious filmmaking.

If your tastes in crime fiction lean more toward whiskey-soaked detectives, A Simple Favor might be bubbly enough to give you a headache despite the darkness of its themes. But that’s okay. More prosecco for the rest of us.

The film features some of the most clichéd aphorisms about kindness and inner beauty this side of an inspirational wall hanging. But honestly? It could have been a lot worse.

So, yes, Shin Godzilla is dialogue-heavy, and sometimes it fails to make much sense. And after that knockout battle scene in the middle of the film, the end conflict is a little anticlimactic, especially for Western audiences used to a lone hero sacrificing themselves to save the day instead of the successful execution of a coordinated team effort.

It could hit harder, however, were its impact not diluted by the overly long runtime and uneven tone. For a movie that undercuts itself for its own amusement, however, intermittently successful is pretty good.

Unsurprisingly for a Del Toro film, the production design is the real star of Crimson Peak.

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.

Pure popcorn entertainment, superimposing the dynamic synths and narrative efficiency of a John Carpenter movie onto the burnished metal and green fatigues of a World War II adventure.

In Blair’s The Toxic Avenger, the side gags are the film. The rest of it is the filler.

By channeling the gravitas of Western sci-fi movies, Kalki 2898 AD loses some of the range that makes Indian movies special. Its ambition is to be applauded. Its self-seriousness, not so much.

Let’s just say that Last Night In Soho is giallo in at least one big respect: Like many of those films, it starts off with a strong concept, then crumbles when it’s time to move beyond striking imagery and get down to the more functional aspects of storytelling.

Where the film stands out from other dramas of its type is in its poignant exploration of the little-discussed emotional consequences of single-mindedly pursuing the American dream.

Flanagan has a couple of solid genre films on his résumé already; at this point in his career, it would have been surprising if Origin Of Evil wasn’t better than Ouija. It is better, though, in every conceivable way, from casting to story to atmosphere.

It’s a self-consciously juvenile pizza party of a movie that's lots of fun if you don’t take it too seriously.

The Bill & Ted movies derive much of their humor from the blending of extremely low and extremely high stakes. Face The Music kind of blows it on the former: For all the preaching about the importance of togetherness and unity, the film mostly keeps its fiftysomething stars and their kids apart. Which is a shame.

While Bening does a studied impression of Grahame’s supple body language, she uses a light touch when recreating her Betty Boop-esque voice, letting Grahame’s seductiveness ooze from her gorgeously refined pores.

When The Conjuring 2 focuses its efforts on scaring the audience, it succeeds, wildly. And why wouldn’t it? Wan’s got his horror technique locked down at this point. It’s the parts where it wanders away from the basics of creating and releasing tension that prevent it from outdoing its predecessor.

Swan Song can be clumsy and sentimental at times, but that’s sometimes the cost of earnestness.

The setup is forgettable, but Stopmotion builds to a grotesque and darkly beautiful finale that’s a great showcase for stop-motion animator Robert Morgan.

Drop is a tightly plotted and unpretentious thrill ride.

Although it’s a reductive statement, calling Swallow a high-class version of "My Strange Addiction" isn’t entirely inaccurate.

Cox and Hirsch are both accomplished actors with an easy, believable chemistry, and Cox in particular has the gravitas to really sell some of the more grotesque plot twists.

For all these films’ paeans to grime and sleaze, they’re controlled imitations rather than the uninhibited real thing.

Your Lucky Day moves along at an engaging pace throughout, although it doesn’t reach its brutal potential as a thriller until two-thirds of the way through. Up to that point, it’s burdened by clumsy repetition of its central theme.

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.

The film is a snappy, glib tour of recent history in the Adam McKay mold, hydroplaning through the stormy real-life events that led to Ailes’ departure from Fox News with windshield wipers on high and blinders strapped to each side of its head.

The four participating directors were all given complete creative freedom for their films, limited only by budget and running time. The fact that three of them have to do with motherhood is a coincidence, a thematic near-miss that’s emblematic of the film’s main disjointed weakness.

That heartfelt element translates into the benevolence of the adults in this film—Perlman is especially big-hearted, no surprise there—not to mention Tsang’s obvious affection for her troubled protagonist. Together, they imbue “Marvelous and the Black Hole” with enough warmth to overcome its practical limitations. Talk about a sleight of hand trick.

The Villainess delivers all the overstuffed thrills we’ve come to expect from Korean action cinema. But it also strains under the weight of those expectations.

Part IMAX nature documentary and part Hollywood disaster movie, it does an effective job of conveying what it’s like to climb the mountain, the hours and days spent acclimating on practice hikes, and the punishing physical effects that accompany each subsequent change of altitude.

The thing that haunted me the most about the film afterwards—aside from Riley Keough’s choking screams in one particularly intense, symbolically loaded sequence—was the ludicrousness of its plot.

Anthology films are known for being inconsistent, and after the wild mood swings of recent horror anthologies like the "V/H/S" and "ABCs Of Death" movies, it’s a relief to report that despite consisting of 10 segments directed by 11 people, Tales Of Halloween is remarkably cohesive.

Synchronic does allow its symbolism to grow relatively organically, but in terms of character arc and parting message, this film is far more conventional than those that have come before. And a little something is lost in these broader strokes, particularly because they seem to have been self-imposed.

Z’s greatest virtue is in the delivery of its frights, which hit like a slap in the face despite falling into the general category of “jump scares.”

Trying to fight this film’s sensations, as unpleasant as they may be at times, will bring nothing but misery. So just give in, vibe out, and take solace in the fact that “Ash” is way more accessible than Flying Lotus’ first film.

Buster’s Mal Heart is indie sci-fi at its most abstract, taking elements of more populist, influential films like "Fight Club" and "The Matrix" and filtering them through philosophical exchanges and coolly stylized compositions to produce something that’s somehow simultaneously more weighty and more slight.

Hart’s isn’t the first movie to reframe the tough-guy crime movie from a woman’s perspective; in fact, the concept has become something of a theme over the past couple of years, producing both great films and ones that are, well, not so great. I’m Your Woman sails right down the middle.

In a cinematic landscape where retro throwbacks are predictably bundled around the same small set of nostalgia-friendly filmmakers (we all love Carpenter, but come on), it’s positively invigorating to see a loving tribute to a director’s influences that’s also aggressively avant-garde.

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

In many ways, the film is reminiscent of last year’s arthouse horror hit Raw, using monstrous transformation as a metaphor for puberty and sexual awakening. It’s not as extreme as Raw in its content, though, nor as skillful in its technique.

It has a wacky premise involving a woman swapping places with a chair, but the uncompromising consumerist satire By Design is more performance art than camp classic.

The material is edgy and at times outrageously gory and chaotic, but Bettis gives Mandy an exhausted, fed-up quality that keeps the movie on track, even (or maybe especially) when she’s pissed off about having to do everything herself.

Where Resurrections really disappoints is in the staging of the action. The Hong Kong-influenced long shots that made The Matrix so revolutionary are all but absent, replaced by rapid cuts that render the fight choreography less legible than in previous installments.