Katie Rife

Ethan Coen goes solo – sort of – with Drive-Away Dolls, a raunchy, dizzy road-trip comedy that’s a little too slick for its own good.

Oddity is an elegantly constructed tale of supernatural revenge that’s full of spine-tingling atmosphere.

It’s true that Lib smashing against the brick wall of blind faith is an essential part of the story, but at some point, The Wonder crosses a line between eerie ambiguity and aimless floundering.

Nicolas Cage’s live-wire performance fuels a compelling, if predictable, crime thriller.

A quick, funny victory lap for anti-establishment Redditors and stonk enthusiasts.

Tim Robinson’s first movie-star role is like an extended I Think You Should Leave sketch with fancier camera work and a guest appearance by Paul Rudd.

Drop is a tightly plotted and unpretentious thrill ride.

The Ugly Stepsister’s torture-porn take on a classic fairy tale is told from a teenager’s point of view, but the grotesque elements are appropriate for gorehounds of all ages.

French creature feature Infested delivers the creepy-crawly kicks promised by its title, although its human elements don’t really go anywhere.

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.

Allowing both love and money to complicate the primal enjoyment of watching muscular men in sweatpants gyrate ends up diluting the film’s once-simple pleasures. Maybe you can’t have it all.

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.

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.

Magic Mike XXL is a piece of arm candy, as shallow as a mud puddle and just as bright. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun to hang out with.

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

While Alvarez acquits himself with thrilling action sequences and breakneck pacing, the overall impression left by this “New Dragon Tattoo Story” is one of a razor-sharp blade dulled by the demands of franchise filmmaking.

The film has fun lobbing snarky one-liners and outrageous bloodshed at the audience, but on the whole, Violent Night’s big red bag of self-aware tricks is overstuffed.

This film is charming and educational enough, but it’s not especially profound; it flirts with big ideas about the origins of life and the twin cycles of creation and destruction but doesn’t really let them sink in.

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.

The Perfection takes deep, fetishistic satisfaction in pushing the envelope, then pushing it some more, building in seductive fits and shocking starts to an orgiastic frenzy of cinematic excess. Is it a progressive movie? Not especially, but that’s okay as long as you know what you’re getting into.

The problem is that, while the film is conceptually solid, its story gets shakier as it goes along.

You might say that How To Be Single suffers from the influence of its older, more put-together sister Sex And The City, right down to the sappy montage and voice-over it needs to tie everything together at the end.

A distinctly tongue-in-cheek slasher made in the autumn of the genre’s popularity, Rospo Pallenberg’s (EXCALIBUR) Cutting Class is a lavishly mounted and self-aware take on the genre’s best loved tropes.

Aside from the A-list cast, there isn’t much to differentiate Dark Places from an especially grim TV movie.

Film noir is a cynical genre, and the script makes gestures toward establishing that these characters live in a cold world where nothing matters but the almighty dollar. But del Toro is a romantic at heart, and can’t help swooning where the subtext wants to spit. His sensibility isn’t a bad thing. It just works better when the monsters aren’t human.

What stands out about the film is the pain that lies underneath Bustamante’s placid compositions—an anguished desire for justice that, like the Weeping Woman herself, still cries out to be heard.

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.

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.