Katie Rife

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.