Katie Rife

Overly simplistic piece of Southern poverty porn, which asks questions it’s not really prepared to answer and proceeds from a set of dubious assumptions that undermine whatever nuance it does possess.

The Night Clerk will be remembered, if at all, as a movie de Armas was way too good for — an unfortunate mile marker on her road to movie stardom.

The film flounders a bit in its second half, as it struggles to maintain the tension of its inciting incident. But Harduin’s performance as Gloria goes off her meds and descends into her own private world would be impressive for an actress of any age, let alone a 13-year-old.

While the film is kinetic, colorful, and frantically paced, it’s also not quite as outrageous as Miike’s gonzo ‘90s yakuza movies.

The film is propelled by a confident lead performance from Alexandra Daddario.

Its clever comedic writing couldn’t quite overcome its sometimes subpar camerawork.

On a moment-by-moment level, the action in Birds Of Prey is compelling, drawing more from the Hong Kong style of unbroken takes designed to show off the choreography than the chaotic quick cuts of most American blockbusters.

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.

Even thought it’s a bleak and uncompromising film, it’d be unfair to call Beanpole “misery porn.” The questions it’s asking are much more complicated, and more cutting, than that.

Dolittle is full of anachronistic pop culture references and poop and fart humor, jokes delivered in suspiciously low-impact style by the film’s animated animals.

The Murder Of Nicole Brown Simpson is directed like a Lifetime thriller, relying heavily on stark lighting and ominous music to create suspense. (Neither is effective.)

If you’re looking for something truly groundbreaking—or hilarious—Like A Boss isn’t it.

Overall, though, the director and co-writer’s merciless style is muffled by The Grudge’s over-reliance on clichéd jump scares; more damningly, only some of these are effective, even in terms of cheap thrills. This becomes especially true in the film’s second half, when the ghosts become at once more human and less creepy.

Stanley does a remarkable job keeping the film grounded in emotional reality all things considered, but it’s admittedly an idiosyncratic movie about unconventional people made by an offbeat director.

Soaked in neon and coated with a thick layer of 16mm film grain, it’s a visceral throwback to the gritty action fare that lined video store shelves in the early ’80s as grindhouses gave way to the VHS boom—coincidentally, also the era that made VFW’s core cast famous.

Puts a forward-thinking feminist bent on the Riverdale school of neon Twin Peaks fetishism

It’s impressive to see such sophisticated camera work from a newcomer. But to combine that with experimental narrative and sound techniques, and place it in a detailed mid-century modern environment, and to have all these ambitious gambits (mostly) work, all on an independent film budget...well, it’s quite the feat.

Bliss approaches its aesthetic with a straight-faced intensity, pummeling the viewer with woozy handheld closeups and violent bursts of montage until you feel like maybe you might have been dosed somehow on your way into the theater. The only irony here is that Begos says it’s his most personal movie to date.

A slick and thrilling take on the intersection of mental illness and creative inspiration that also doubles as a commentary on toxic masculinity.

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.

Sure, the cast is full of exciting names, but all of Jarmusch’s absurdist thematic flourishes—the Romero tributes, the meta commentary, the political humor—are half-baked and inconsistently applied.

Horror remakes don’t have to be inferior rehashes, as films like Jim Mickle’s "We Are What We Are" (2013) and Luca Guadagnino’s "Suspiria" (2018) have demonstrated. But this Rabid nibbles where it should clamp down hard.

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.

Little Women is the best kind of Hollywood film: thoughtful yet escapist, sophisticated yet accessible, expertly crafted and deeply felt. The performances are all top notch—Ronan and Pugh, especially, breathe new life into their characters. Gerwig’s direction is also first rate.

As a result, it isn’t as cohesive or inspired as her penultimate film, the Oscar-nominated Faces Places. But as a parting gift from one of the most singular creative minds of the 20th century, it’s as life-affirming as they come.

The overall look of the film has the shiny, empty appearance of a newly rehabbed condo, and the quips about women’s love of cheese and gigantic closets have a similarly hollow sassy-greeting-card feel. But the outfits in those closets, it must be said, are fabulous.

There’s really not much to recommend about this film: the animation lacks texture, the score is overwrought, the plotting is scattershot, and the character design is uninspired.

This accessibility actually hurts the film, exposing the flimsy balsa-wood architecture under all those frills.

Unfortunately, the decade that passed between the two films was long enough for the approach to grow tiresome.

Anyone who’s still engaged by the end of the movie is probably too young to remember the original.

The movie is a mixed bag, well shot and well acted enough to mostly keep the viewer’s attention, but meandering enough to frustrate at the same time. It’s bookended by flat, brightly lit, purely functional scenes that don’t quite erase the memory of the surrealist horrors that unfold at its peak, but do come close.

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.

What the film lacks in depth and focus, it makes up for in personality. Murphy’s obviously the star here, but Moore’s loyal entourage comes to the movie with plenty of charisma of its own.

In The Shadow Of The Moon is a disappointing misfire all around, but no matter—like so many other Netflix original films, it’ll be reabsorbed into the streaming void soon enough.

Whatever pleasure there is to be found in watching a film like The Golden Glove is in the intellectualizing, and the film does prompt a series of provocative questions about the implicit contract between artist and audience.

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.

It’s campy, it’s gory, it’s a little bit titillating, and it features one of those novelty performances from famous actors that tend to bring a lot of press to otherwise under-the-radar productions.

The film isn’t an abject failure by any means; it has some funny jokes, a couple of really good performances, impressive creature and set design, and pleasing cinematography. But when it comes down to it, It Chapter Two just isn’t all that scary.

A meta-commentary on filmmaking in general and cinematic conceptions of beauty in specific, the film is clearly enamored with its own cleverness—which isn’t to say that it’s not clever, just that a more clear-headed film could have distilled its ideas better, and been more satisfying as a result.

Mostly, the action, while bloodier than one might expect, is as goofy and dim-witted as the dialogue.

The Angry Birds Movie 2 is the very definition of empty-calorie cinema—bright and shiny and satisfying enough for a few fleeting moments until it’s balled up and thrown in the trash. It’s also fast-paced, interesting to look at, and notably less irritating than the original, which is all you can really ask of a film like this one.

While the film boasts a refreshing premise — mob wives taking over their husbands’ territory when the men land themselves in jail — what lingers afterwards is the stale taste of its lukewarm execution.

Perhaps that’s why, despite some skillful scene-setting and committed supporting performances, Them That Follow is lifeless enough that small inconsistencies in accents, costuming, and set dressing appear more significant than they would in a more, well, thrilling thriller.

The Tigers’ rooftop hideout is like something out of Hook, and the film moves along at a brisk, Spielbergian clip; however, the combination of dark themes mixed with whimsical fantasy strikes a tone more similar to Guillermo del Toro’s early work.

This is Tarantino’s Eden, the unspoiled garden when the things he loves don’t have to be sought out or championed because they permeate every aspect of life. The sense of blissful immersion extends to the film’s costuming and production design, both of which are as meticulous as one might expect.

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.

As it is, it’s another jarring mismatch in a film full of them. The core issue seems to be indecision over whether this is all supposed to be camp or not.

For the most part, it works. True, the haunted objects are silly at times, but unlike The Nun, Annabelle Comes Home is only funny when it’s supposed to be. And it’s enjoyable because of its clockwork efficiency, not in spite of it.

As a show-business fairytale, Wild Rose is pretty standard. But as a character study, it’s something special. That’s due largely to Buckley’s star-making performance as Rose-Lynn.

Now, Garris’ unflagging enthusiasm for uplifting his fellow creators has found a new manifestation: Nightmare Cinema, a sort of sideways revival of the Masters Of Horror franchise.

Director F. Gary Gray, while experienced in both action and comedy, also struggles to keep the film’s picaresque plot on track.

Spencer provides her character the kind of human dimension only a performer of her caliber could muster.

You can’t just have two hours of kaiju slapping each other around like a gargantuan WWE highlights reel.

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.

What good high school movies do is take the basics of the teenage condition and refocus them for a specific generation’s point of view. That’s where Booksmart excels.

Director Gail Mancuso, a TV comedy veteran, gets the desired effect — as manipulative as it may be — out of both the funny scenes and the sad ones, leading up to a finale that can only be described as weapons-grade tearjerker material.

While the chemistry between the core cast is easy and convincing, generated by skillful banter and impromptu singalongs, the scripted elements of Wine Country are more mixed.

For as much as Charlie Says tries to reframe everything we know about the Manson Family, its characterization of the women remains shallow.

The scales ultimately tip slightly in favor of style, but when that style is this gorgeous, remembering a movie for the way it looks rather than its plot isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

The film is so full of jump scare fake-outs and shout-at-the-screen moments, it neglects to build sustained suspense — a far worse sin than its lack of logic, which can actually be kind of fun.

While Benjamin’s choice to give Wendy little to no backstory makes sense given the film’s overall efficiency, Body At Brighton Rock would be more memorable if she was fleshed out a little further. It’s more fun to cheer for a character that you really feel like you know — even if you just met them.

Little Woods revolves around a remarkable lead performance: Thompson shows her range as an actress in this film in ways that, as fun as they can be, she just doesn’t get to in any of her blockbuster roles.

In some ways, Rafiki recalls Nijla Mu’min’s 2018 film "Jinn," which also superimposes a unique, beautifully realized point of view onto a conventional coming-of-age story.

Lane’s lighthearted approach will probably convert more than a few viewers to the TST cause — it’s a short walk from pissed-off atheist to smirking satanist. Given how entrenched the culture wars have become in America, maybe all Satan needs at this point is a good publicist.

Less a thrilling adventure tale than a trip to a teenager’s messy, sock-strewn bedroom.

The worst part of The Haunting Of Sharon Tate is how seriously it takes its ham-fisted themes of fate and the nature of reality; the movie opens with an Edgar Allen Poe quote, for f*ck’s sake.

It’s a candy necklace of a movie: sweet but chalky.

Farrell’s Kentucky accent here is as merely passable as his Chicago accent in Widows was, and Parker’s precocious interest in physics and chemistry seems similarly phoned-in. Both characters are just there to keep the story moving, to provide awestruck reaction shots as we move from oddly muted spectacle to agreeable callback to the heartwarming happy ending.

If you can tolerate a little saccharine piano music and ethereal backlighting with your food porn, Ramen Shop is an appetizing little bite of multicultural foodie edutainment.

The slimness of the plot—and its familiarity, if you’ve seen Lelio’s original film — also allows the viewer to focus on Gloria Bell’s true raison d’être: the one and only Julianne Moore.

This is a slight film, unlikely to be remembered in the long-term by anyone but completists who discover it during deep dives into its leads’ respective filmographies. But, oh, what a giddy ride awaits them.

It’s a feature-length in-joke for fans who will always pause if My Best Friend’s Wedding pops up during a lazy Saturday afternoon channel-surfing session, but who ultimately consider rom-coms a slightly shameful guilty pleasure.

One thing that does translate is Morland’s extremely dry, extremely dark sense of humor, which manifests at the bleakest moments of the story like whoopee cushions lining the pews at a funeral.

It reinvents the zombie movie.

Unlike "Gotti," King Of Thieves doesn’t have one iconic actor burning through decades’ worth of goodwill. It has six.

Rather than defanging the story, sanding down The Standoff At Sparrow Creek’s political implications foregrounds its exceptional dialogue and strong performances, revealing the lean, punchy, beautifully shot ’70s-style thriller underneath the controversial premise.

This year’s entry into the winter animal-movie canon, A Dog’s Way Home, comes this close to just being a simple, cute animal movie, until the humans complicate things.

Screenwriter Julie Lipson’s well-written, naturalistic dialogue helps pass the time, as does Michelle Lawler’s lovely scenic cinematography. But although what we get instead stands on its own merits, this survival thriller could have used a few more thrills.

The escape-room scenes themselves (a.k.a. the good stuff) are imaginatively conceived and deftly executed enough to justify a late-night cable viewing.

Buffalo Boys isn’t terribly concerned with sweeping vistas or slow-burn character development. Its primary function is simply to entertain, which in practical action-movie terms means lots of brawling and lots of blood.

In the end, Bird Box’s most significant shortcoming is that it’s just too inert and unfocused to work as sci-fi horror.

This is a headache-inducing spectacle that raises more questions than it answers, and does little to inspire viewers to go find the answers themselves. But hey, at least it’s too loud to fall asleep to.

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.

Wu weaves together the stories of two live-streaming stars, a manager, and a devoted fan to form a portrait not only of the extreme acceleration that defines contemporary Chinese pop culture, but also the bizarre fantasy economy and parasitic interdependencies of late capitalism as a whole.

So it’s bit disconcerting, the unfamiliar sensation provoked by his new movie, The Favourite: Is this the first Yorgos Lanthimos film that can be called genuinely fun?

Equally importantly, it shows how much an artist like Mu’min can bring to otherwise well-trod material, and how valuable underrepresented points of view like hers really are.

Mazzei’s script and Goldhaber’s direction complement each other beautifully, with true-to-life details like the tacky dollar-store carpet that decorates Alice’s camming room and the pink taser she keeps in her car playing off of—and enhancing—the naturalistic dialogue.

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.

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.

Every aspect of of the movie feels as if it’s been determined by algorithm, workshopped and test-marketed into a state of pleasant, fleeting dullness.

Just when you think you’ve seen it all, along comes Border. A thematically rich and deeply strange blend of romantic drama, magical-realist fantasy, and crime thriller, Sweden’s official entry to this year’s Academy Awards splits the difference between the highbrow cringe comedy of "Toni Erdmann" and the lowbrow cop fantasy "Bright."

Maintaining an audience’s sympathy for a character through their most fumbling, frustrating lows requires compassion and clarity of purpose, both of which McCarthy amply demonstrates here. It’s a career-best performance, the kind of nuanced turn we all suspected she could deliver, if only someone would give her a chance to do it.

Revelations completes Hellraiser’s transformation from an original and refreshingly adult concept into teens indiscriminately screwing and dying, hollowing out the soul of the franchise while functioning as a loose remake of the original.

Sheila’s humanity is a necessary counterbalance to Strickland’s intentionally stiff, formal style, which manifests in the film’s efficient pacing and crisp sound editing as well as its stylized performances and lavish production design.

Burning actually justifies its running time by slowly building paranoid atmosphere before an explosive, hauntingly ambiguous finale.

The gauzy cinematography also helps, as does the mise-en-scène, which poses Anne’s chosen family of proud perverts in studied tableaus reminiscent of the Renaissance masters. Only, you know, in a porno.

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.

The film introduces interesting themes as though they’ll build to something, only to let them spill out like so much viscera from an especially nasty wound.

Åkerlund’s understanding is more like contempt, in a film that downplays the bigotry of the Norwegian black metal scene and shrugs off the severity of its actions with a “boys will be boys” approach that has no reverence for the scene, but doesn’t provide any insight into it, either.

While an extended sequence set in a Holy Week festival at a baroque Spanish castle does provide some flashes of that old Gilliam magic, mostly this is just a warmed-over Fellini rehash.

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.

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.

A slight, sweetly cynical indie dramedy about family and belonging and the ways we cope with life’s disappointments.

It’s not an attractive comparison, but The Greasy Strangler in some ways recalls "The Human Centipede III," in that it raises questions about a filmmaker’s relationship with the viewer. This is a far better and less offensive film than Tom Six’s, but it also comes custom-built to discomfit the majority of its audience.

But even though it doesn’t make much sense, Phantasm is wildly imaginative and legitimately creepy, confronting death and mourning as part of the coming-of-age process while also delivering nutty Jawa-type critters and blood spurting out of peoples’ faces.

In some ways, the more novel element is the film’s depiction of chess, which in Katwe is a popular sport on the level of football. And while that might seem unlikely, it’s accurate, at least in the wake of Mutesi’s success.

Structurally, Hillsong: Let Hope Rise is hopelessly confused, jumping back and forth in time and space documenting the buildup to a big Hillsong United show at The Forum in Los Angeles, where the band will debut its new album.

When The Bough Breaks resembles nothing more than a cheap fast-food burger served on fine china: Tasty, sure, and quite enjoyable in the moment. But once the credits roll and the primal centers of the brain stimulated by guilty pleasures like this one return to normal, all you’ll remember is that it looked prettier than usual.

It’s the kind of film that, rather like its mournful title apparition, clings to your sleeve and follows you home.

This movie can’t decide how it wants to look or what it wants to say. You could even call the jumble of styles and tones “quirky,” were you so inclined.

On Curb, it’s Larry David’s neuroses that drive his frequent public humiliation. In Klown, the problem is more that Casper and Frank can’t keep it in their pants.

What sets I Am Not A Serial Killer apart from other takes on this “killers hunting killers” concept (Dexter, anyone?) is its naturalistic, character-based approach.

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.

Hugh Grant’s face is perpetually locked in a concerned grimace as Bayfield, whose mind always seems to be elsewhere when he’s not doting on his wife.

From its opening title card proclaiming “This film should be played loud,” the telekinetic body-horror film The Mind’s Eye is punk as f--k.

He can afford the best treatments and technologies and — by the end — even to extend his life, because he’s a well-off former NFL player. Most patients don’t have these luxuries.

Overall Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie is as shallow as a puddle of Dom Pérignon spilled on the bow of a luxury yacht. That’s the joke, you see.

Suffice to say, masks are a big deal in the world of Mexican professional wrestling, known colloquially as lucha libre. Why are they such a big deal? Even after watching the movie, it’s hard to explain.

As it progresses, The Secret Life Of Pets starts to overreach dramatically, and loses some of its charm in the process.

Keating keeps the story tight, giving the audience enough twists and turns to keep the ride fun.

The Fundamentals Of Caring is about as generic as indie dramedies come. (It even has ukulele on the soundtrack.) That doesn’t make it a bad movie—the cast all turn in convincing performances, and the dialogue is occasionally quite clever—but it doesn’t make it a memorable one either.

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.

Pop-culture references, witty banter, broad slapstick, and sentimental speeches all fall equally flat.

Dough makes smoking pot seem about as edgy as falling asleep in front of the TV.

This is the very definition of the kind of movie people complain that “they” don’t make anymore: a modestly budgeted, character-driven drama for adults that doesn’t insult the viewer’s intelligence or lean on shock value.

Like a family dinner with an eccentric uncle, Holidays’ quirkiness is fitfully entertaining, but ultimately exhausting.

On a purely technical level, the film is fine, if overly reliant on indie-movie clichés. It features some good performances from proven actors, and touches on some interesting philosophical questions.

Kusama expertly manipulates the tone throughout, ratcheting up tension and releasing it in quick bursts of nervous laughter, only to build it up again.

Darling is light on plot and long on style, meaning that horror fans who criticized "The Witch" as “boring” may have a similar reaction here as well.

Anyone deep enough into the genre to watch a movie like Baskin may find it, for all its bizarre and beautiful surrealistic imagery, oddly uninspiring.

If you enjoy strippers delivering monologues on Bugs Bunny — something that actually happens in this movie — then Too Late will scratch that same adolescent itch that leads young film buffs to dress in black suits and Ray-Bans after seeing "Reservoir Dogs" for the first time.

Despite some compelling performances, this R-rated but genial dramedy is a lot like its protagonist: unconventional, yet playing it safe.

Starring Kingsman: The Secret Service’s Taron Egerton jutting out his chin and sporting oversized glasses in a concerted attempt to appear less handsome, Eddie The Eagle wears its quirkiness on its puffed sleeve.

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.

Tacking the weakest segments onto the end of the film may leave some viewers exiting the theater with a shrug, but the interesting bits are original enough to stick.

When Wayans allows himself to deviate from his formula there are a few effective moments of un-self-conscious slapstick.

At least, maybe The Boy can lead some novices to better, more original horror movies.

Yes, this is a movie for children. But using that as a justification for lazy work, as if kids are inherently too dumb to know the difference, isn’t just condescending. In a post-Pixar world, where audiences have become accustomed to quality animated family films, it’s a waste of money.

Fey and Poehler are clearly the center of the film, and watching their lively games of verbal ping-pong is always an enjoyable way to spend 90 minutes or so.

Jolie and Pitt are both, without a doubt, very good actors, and in the film’s rare moments of vulnerability, their fights and reconciliations contain a seed of devastating emotional truth that speaks to the pair’s talent and real-life bond. But those moments are suffocated under long, dreadfully dull sequences where everyone poses artfully and says very little.

On the plus side, the film is high energy and moves quickly. And some of the zombie gore effects are fun, reaching nearly Raimi-esque heights of splatter during the climactic battle. None of it is really scary, though, especially since it’s so predictable.

S. Craig Zahler’s horror-Western hybrid Bone Tomahawk is a strange movie, one that might take more than one watch to fully understand. Not that it’s deliberately obscure, or has a plot too complicated to follow the first time around. It’s actually a pretty straightforward film, albeit one filled with eccentric choices.

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.

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.