Katie Rife

While the film’s attempts at slapstick can be painful — in a cringing way, not in a brutal way — Heavy Trip does succeed in creating perhaps the most charming ensemble of morbid dorks since "What We Do In The Shadows."

Unlike the director’s debut feature The Cabin In The Woods, Bad Times At The El Royale isn’t a deconstruction of the neo-noir genre so much as a structurally ambitious example of same.

At the center of it all is Kidman, the indisputable heart of the film, whose all-in performance elevates Destroyer above a well-made cop drama and into something special.

As bold (and potentially alienating) as Guadagnino’s take on Suspiria might be, it’s also extremely precise, and he places each sweeping caftan and gurgling sound effect with the focus and intention of an haute cuisine chef fussing over garnishes. Prepare your palate accordingly.

The fantasy and horror sections of The House With A Clock In Its Walls, including a scene where our core trio must fight reanimated jack-o’-lanterns, are full of wonder. Some of them — and this is a sentence we never thought we’d write about an Eli Roth movie — downright sparkle.

Putting Kristen Stewart and Chloë Sevigny on screen together was a wonderful choice—one that doesn’t deserve to be drowned in a torrent of confusing, implausible, and just downright dull ones.

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 acting is hammy, but intentionally so, as is the crude, greasepaint-and-baby powder makeup on the ghosts. Clearly, Vesely has pushed the stylization of the piece as far as it can go in order to compensate for Slice’s low budget.

Nyoni is clearly confident in her vision and the story she wants to tell, and in her capable hands, the result is spellbinding.

If your heart skips a beat during this movie, it’ll probably be from laughter. But if you adjust your expectations and go in expecting something loud, lurid, and frequently utterly ridiculous, it’s good for a cheap adrenaline rush all the same.

Like "Amer" and "The Strange Color Of Your Body’s Tears," Let The Corpses Tan is fetishistic, kaleidoscopic, and obsessed with the intersection between sex and death.

Something worse than bad. It’s utterly forgettable.

With its blaring hardcore punk soundtrack and aggressive neon color palette, The Ranger isn’t remotely subtle. Given the type of movie it is, that’s mostly a good thing, though the in-your-face style gives away some of the aforementioned character-driven twists earlier than it should.

It’s Close’s wonderfully subtle characterization of Joan that lifts The Wife above its cliché setups and neat role reversals, which is really rather ironic. Once again, it’s the wife doing all the hard work. At least this time, she gets top billing.

The film’s dialogue and characterization are similarly undercooked: The script strains painfully hard for off-the-cuff vulgarity, but never quite achieves it, and while the pop culture references—always a punching bag for critics when dealing with nostalgia-themed entertainments—are applied sparingly, the tin-earned dialogue gives them an awkward, shoehorned-in quality.

In fact, all the weed smoking and street-smart sidewalk banter aside, Skate Kitchen’s perspective is, in many ways, downright innocent; as such, it may be a better fit for adolescent viewers than adult ones.

Much of what’s around them is rote and uneven, but Kunis and McKinnon are a comedic duo worth hanging on to.

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.

A film that’s refreshingly free of the gushing sound bites from sycophantic celebrities that too often dominate fashion documentaries.

In the end, though, it’s the very concepts that make The Night Eats The World sound insufferably pretentious on paper — namely, its high-minded ideas and emphasis on small moments — that tip the film toward intriguing rather than, well, zombifying.

Despite the sensitivity of its storytelling, and Chastain’s career-defining passion for playing headstrong, independent women like Mrs. Weldon, it also never really comes to life.

Flavorless and unexciting, thanks to an execution as formulaic as a well-worn copy of "The Joy Of Cooking."

When the new SuperFly does show flashes of street-smart wit...its energy is infectious. Mostly, though, it needs to take its hero’s advice and take things up a notch.

In the end, Nancy is a bit too dogmatic in its refusal to provide easy answers, its emotional impact dissipating like dust in a sunbeam with every understated non-revelation.

Pin Cushion is as quirky and as prickly as its title, an unclassifiable dramedy about bullying and mother-daughter relationships that proposes that mean-girl behavior doesn’t go away after high school.

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.

The script is so lazy and outdated in its humor, it condescends to the same audience it purports to empower.

The way the script pulls its punches is less offensive than simply toothless, giving Overboard the feel of a film written by a focus group, or maybe a script-writing robot programmed with the latest demographic trends.

Duck Butter is clever without being all that hilarious, and personal without being all that revealing.

It’s not a great film by any means, but it is the epitome of a “Fantastic Fest movie,” meaning enjoyed best with friends and a few drinks.

It’s a muddled, contradictory, confusing mess, made even more so by the darkly cynical streak that runs through the film.

Although The Endless works just fine as a standalone film, looking at it in the wider context of Benson and Moorhead’s work highlights another, more meta theme: the desire to return to an earlier, simpler period in one’s life, and relive those glory days forever.

So what was Tyler Perry going for here? Based on the sanctimonious streak that runs throughout his work, one might posit that he was trying to wrap a gleefully outrageous thriller around a lesson on marriage, like a slice of bacon around a particularly bitter pill. Except, at some point, the bacon got hopelessly overcooked.

The film works best if you approach it as a fantasy, with Jen as a near-supernatural angel of vengeance; otherwise, it’s easy to get hung up on the inconsistencies as the action grows increasingly over-the-top.

Beyond the characterization of its complex anti-heroine, though, I Kill Giants doesn’t stray too far from an established collection of story beats, stretched thin over a slightly too-long 106-minute run time.

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

It’s a serviceable period ghost story that’s slight in story and not exactly subtle in themes, but contains a few genuinely striking images and atmosphere to spare.

The shining star of this little community is Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas), who’s put together an intimate gathering of friends to celebrate her recent promotion to Shadow Minister for Health.

Turns out, what really turns series creator E.L. James on is well-heeled domesticity.

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

She’s (Henson) a compelling leading woman, all in all. Too bad she’s stuck in such an incompetently directed mess of a movie.

Bright gestures vaguely at an allegory about police brutality and race, which may have been more impactful in the original script. It’s hard to tell. For his part, Landis has largely disowned the final product, which buries some glimmers of interesting ideas under a thick layer of adolescent tough-guy posturing.

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.

Fast-paced, frequently funny, and consistently entertaining.

This particular film is a collection of cutesy “going in style” clichés — old lady on a motorcycle? Check. Senior-citizen oral sex joke? Check. — compiled into a road movie with shades of "About Schmidt" and "Little Miss Sunshine," and a morbid streak that comes in to cut the quirkiness just a little bit too late.

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.

The years have not mellowed Miike’s flair for over-the-top bloodshed, but they have refined his style. His decades of action-movie experience are evident in this kinetic, punchy live-action cartoon, which remains lively and charming enough to keep the audience engaged throughout most of its epic 140-minute running time.

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

The script is just as lazy as the acting, leaning on a fitfully applied, Scream-esque meta subplot to justify why the hell we’re all here in the first place.

The film, a slow-motion car crash of a cinematic mishap featuring terrible performances from normally good actors and a bafflingly half-baked script, delivers tenfold on the poster’s promise.

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

The film will continue to defy your expectations.

Perhaps because he’s had a couple of decades to think about it, Flanagan’s vision for the film is assured, full of intimate closeups that allow Gugino’s multi-layered performance to shine.

Viewers who thought nothing much happened in "It Comes At Night" are advised to steer clear.

The most remarkable thing about First They Killed My Father is how quiet it is.

It’s paper-thin, predictable, and goofy as hell, but if you can get past the whole “pro-military propaganda” thing, it’s pretty fun in the moment.

The younger Meyers has a lot to learn about creating believable character motivations and relationships to anchor the aspirational fantasy.

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

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.

While it’s understandable that Walls might not want to linger on the more grim aspects of her childhood, Cretton’s decision to pull punches on those exact moments takes what could be a powerful tale of resilience and forgiveness and spins it into just another piece of Hollywood feel-good fluff.

The biggest selling point of Ingrid Goes West is its screenplay, which is full of deadpan comic flourishes.

While there is plenty of drinking and a fair amount of drugs (just pot though, let’s not go crazy), the overall effect is more akin to passing out on the couch at 9 p.m. than partying until dawn.

To be fair, it’s difficult not to be outshone by Jessica Williams, whose star has been continually on the rise since her debut on The Daily Show in 2012. It’s interesting, then, that this irrepressible personality would have her first starring film role project be as low-key as The Incredible Jessica James, especially since it seems to have been written just for her.

Killing Ground comes down to what you want to experience in a horror movie. Granted, all this elaborately constructed savagery is upsetting, so the film succeeds on that level. But without suspense to propel it forward, and without a compelling backstory to deepen the intrigue, upset is all we’ve got.

By engaging with multiple forms of oppression, the film forms a radical statement on the intersections of racism, classism, and sexism that elevates it far beyond a nicely shot, Victorian-era episode of "Snapped."

There are many moving scenes in City Of Ghosts, but towards the end of the film one especially powerful sequence shows a RBSS member shaking uncontrollably as he thumbs through a stack of pictures of his friends, dead and alive.

Pop Aye is a standard, if well-made, indie road trip dramedy. But, you know, with an elephant.

Trouble is, it’s still 2017, and although our culture keeps getting more intensely ironic all the time, we’re not quite yet to the point where this level of artifice is easily digestible.

To compare Rough Night to another relatively recent female-led comedy, the film incorporates its violence with less tonal whiplash than in the 2013 Sandra Bullock/Melissa McCarthy comedy "The Heat," not only because of the tone set by the hard-R dialogue, but also because the dead body jokes are more "Weekend At Bernie’s" than anything.

Maybe there’s something out there, or maybe there’s nothing at all. Most horror films presuppose that the former is the scarier of the two options, but It Comes At Night is more concerned with the seemingly bottomless depths of the unknown.

Vincent N Roxxy, which suffers from many of the same shortcomings that plagued tough-talking Tarantino homages in the late ’90s but distinguishes itself with a satisfying climax.

This tedious kidnapping drama doesn’t have anything especially insightful to say about Clare’s ordeal, which makes watching her go through it an even more trying experience.

The film does have its charms. The outside world, when we do reach it, is as gorgeous for the audience as it must appear to someone seeing it for the first time.

The Survivalist rewards with thoughtful cinematography — one fluid shot that effectively shifts the balance of power in a scene is especially noteworthy — and character development. But viewers looking for zombie attacks or thrilling chase scenes should go elsewhere.

Hounds Of Love is a remarkable achievement in that it does exactly what it sets out to do, and what it sets out to do is traumatize the hell out of you. You just might not want to watch it twice.

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.

Which brings us to the fatal flaw in Unforgettable: With its formulaic story and hackneyed dialogue, all there is to do in between moments of self-aware outrageousness is admire the decor, like an Anthropologie catalog punctuated with the occasional knife wound.

As far as animated films go, the script for Spark: A Space Tail is clunky but inoffensive, falling far short of your average Pixar production creatively but largely sidestepping attempts at tongue-in-cheek “adult” humor in favor of groan-worthy puns à la the title.

Monster movies aren’t generally known for their subtlety, but leave it to Nacho Vigalondo to make one that keeps surprising its audience until the very end.

Basically, this movie is exceedingly clever until it isn’t, finding creative ways to explain outrageous plot points until it gets tired and starts bombarding its young target audience with chase sequences instead.

Given the alternative between the big-screen CHIPS and an antiquated, low-stakes episode of the original TV series, we’d pick the latter in a heartbeat.

A wryly misanthropic slasher comedy about a woman whose fetus commands her to kill.

Byrne adds a twist by appealing to a growing and under-represented segment of the extreme art forms’ shared fan base: parents.

The film gained an unfortunate reputation as a gross-out cannibal shocker on the festival circuit, and while that categorization is not entirely, technically incorrect — this is a piece of body horror, and an intensely visceral one — it detracts from the striking imagery and layered symbolism of Ducournau’s uncommonly assured debut feature.

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

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.

It’s a female-driven fantasy, for sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s not toxic. And God help the poor woman who believes it.

For her debut feature, The Lure, Smoczyńska has very loosely adapted Hans Christian Andersen’s classic story — so loosely, you might not realize that’s what she’s doing until halfway through — into a genre-defying film that blends elements of musicals, horror, romance, and fantasy into a contemporary fairy tale that celebrates the animalistic, the feminine, and the intimate intersections between the two.

So what is a dog’s purpose? To provide gentle, forgettable entertainment for moviegoers who lament that “they” don’t make “nice” movies anymore, apparently. For the rest of us, it’s more like a 100-minute nap.

The essential question here, of course, is how kickass those action scenes are, since no one’s watching an xXx movie for the plot. (That particular assumption may explain how loose the continuity remains throughout.) The answer is variable.

The effect of Passengers is to turn frothy sci-fi romance into an astonishingly retrograde statement on autonomy and consent, and to turn one of the most likable actors in Hollywood into a total fucking creep. A date movie, this is not.

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.

It’s not intensely scary, but it is faithful to its ’80s influences, right on down to the deadbeat dad.

Incarnate is a comic-book movie in search of a comic book.

If The Love Witch simply raised the profile of its director, Anna Biller — a true auteur who not only wrote, directed, produced, and edited this film but also designed and hand made its sets and costumes — then it would be a success.

While it doesn’t include any literal blazing piles of garbage, Trash Fire is spiteful and unpleasant from beginning to end, using every technique at its disposal — from stinging dialogue to grotesque prosthetics to morbid black comedy — to make the audience uncomfortable.

Director Greg Mottola deserves some credit for trying to give the film a little bit of cinematic flair, something that’s lacking in many Hollywood comedies these days.

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.