Katie Rife

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

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.

Plenty of striking, clever, effective movies have been made simply by re-arranging and re-calibrating familiar genre elements. Hellions might have been one of these, if it was predicated on something slightly less shallow than “kids in masks + chanting + blood = scary.”

So while this is all rather dumb, it’s dumb fun, and aside from some incongruous soundtrack choices—the credits music encourages us to “burn down the disco,” which, sure, but during office hours?—director Brian James O’Connell plays all of his tonal elements right, which is to say fast-paced; goofy; and very, very bloody.

The gore is there, as are the transformation sequences, but they’re played in such a muted fashion that their more visceral pleasures are somewhat mitigated. But viewers who check their expectations will find a solid entry into the burgeoning feminist werewolf sub-genre that’s well worth a look.

Post-"The Canyons," this appears to be Ellis’ new, second-rate normal.

The film uses minimal locations, minimal cast, and minimal blood for a story that, in another director’s hands, could play like Grand Guignol. But this sense of restraint — which, combined with some stylish choices on Polish’s part, can be quite elegant — is also what makes it largely forgettable.

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

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.

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.

An overlooked gem in the annals of low-budget horror.

A pulpy, violent tale of revenge based on a comic serialized in a popular Playboy-esque men’s magazine, Lady Snowblood didn’t have to be art. But director Toshiya Fujita treated it as such, utilizing a complicated flashback structure and expressionistic cinematography to tell the story of Yuki Kashima, a highly skilled assassin trained from birth to find and kill the men (and woman) responsible for murdering her father and raping her mother before she was born.

Black Mama, White Mama is a cheerfully sleazy romp made with the easily distractible drive-in audience in mind.

The first of several low points in the series. At this point Kirsty’s out of the picture (at least temporarily), the original rules of Cenobite engagement are discarded, and Pinhead’s ultimate fate is sealed. So what’s left? You guessed it—a Gritty! Contemporary! Reboot!

Hellseeker at least tries to work itself into the larger Hellraiser mythos by bringing back Ashley Laurence as Kirsty. But like Inferno, it falls so far short of its ambitions that only the most dedicated and generous fan could give it the benefit of the doubt.

Hellraiser: Deader starts off okay—But that’s just Stockholm syndrome.

As far as the Hellraiser elements go, this is the laziest yet.

King Coal goes deeper into the cultural roots of the opioid crisis, looking at a region both devastated and nurtured by “the King” and asking what a future without it might look like.

Russell’s penchant for aesthetic excess is thoroughly indulged, as the director stages grotesque human tableaus straight out of Hieronymus Bosch over Derek Jarman’s intricately detailed sets. The result gives the story a sort of wanton, overripe feel, with such ostensibly austere environments as a cloistered convent about to explode with repressed sensuality.

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.

Nomadland is, in some ways, a condemnation of a system that rewards decades of corporate loyalty with poverty and insecurity. But it’s also remarkably clear-eyed and honest about the pleasures and benefits of life on the road, its blend of documentary and fiction allowing those on the margins to tell their stories on their own terms.

Ridiculous, artless, and wildly entertaining, Dangerous Men is more than the sum of its fascinatingly misguided parts, although it will take a special sort of moviegoer to truly appreciate (or endure, depending on your perspective) its charms. Its instant cult-classic status is all but assured.