Leigh Monson

At its most powerful, Adamma Ebo’s film is an empathetic indictment of a culture that has evolved—and perhaps mutated— from intercommunity support toward the asphyxiating glorification of gaudy figureheads.

Knock At The Cabin is a harrowing and intense home invasion thriller that feels like a step in the right direction for Shyamalan.

Anything’s Possible may be flawed for what it fails to fully develop around the edges of its story, but the central relationship that holds the film together is so compelling that the rest hardly matters.

Bruckner, Collins, and Piotrowski plant their vision in fields that are no less rich, terrifying, or gorily violent than the hellbound story that started it all.

Ultimately, See How They Run is too reverent to its forebears and too toothless in its satire to elevate beyond an overly self-aware genre exercise—competent enough, but all too eager to shoot any attempted subtlety dead where it stands.

Three Thousand Years Of Longing unfortunately undercuts its own effectiveness as a singular piece, presenting less as a unified vision of an auteur director than a scattershot assemblage of motifs, philosophies, and themes in search of a spine to hold them together.

But when it comes to picking out what parts of Ariel’s story to tweak for the new medium, the remake still emphasizes the wrong pieces, consequentially bloating a previously brisk story into a meandering pile of producers’ script notes.

The songs and the performances thereof have been packaged in such a way that they are now more accessible than ever, for an audience that mostly never got to see them performed as originally staged. Yet the film that inspired them has been reduced to a hollow shell in which to carry them, like so much plastic meant to be thrown away.

As a love letter to the sitcom that so inspired Zombie as a child, The Munsters might be the most authentic-feeling television revival ever put on film, warts and all.

It’s a film that is functioning on a very specific artistic wavelength that requires one to buy into it completely in order to fully appreciate its delights. Whether that specific frequency is too obtuse for all but the most hardcore enthusiasts for ’70s sci-fi is up for debate, but the curious would best be served to experience this strange new world for themselves.

While still recommendable for Stephen Lang’s compelling eccentricities, Old Man bears that endorsement with a major caveat for surviving almost solely on that offbeat charisma.

As a dramatic interpretation of Moore’s characters and their hardships, it’s hard to think how a direct translation could much improve upon what Mabry and her cast have put on screen. But without that context, the cavalcade of pain is excessive, perhaps even bordering on farcical, without the breathing room that the novel’s prose provides.

These are jump scares done right, where the struggle to see what’s there is much more effective than any cheap lurch into frame.

For a singularly outlandish and specific premise, this is a film that lets its audience experience the horror right along with the characters on screen. This is cinema as spectacle distilled down to its rawest form, where basic storytelling leads directly to visceral and emotional catharsis.

For what it’s worth, Strays is nominally funny, but in a way that rarely provokes genuine laughs, just chuckles of appreciation. It’s a breezy, inconsequential film that will drip from the wrinkles of your brain like slobber from a chew toy, but as a late-summer distraction, maybe that’s enough.

The film is by no means distinctive, hilarious, or memorable in any way, but, for as cloying as this attempt at Brady brand rehabilitation could have been, it’s a testament to the magnetic appeal of ageless stars who know how to carry a film to the end zone.

Good Enough is a few bland chuckles uttered in a vacuous 90 minutes you struggle to remember even as the credits start to roll. Good Enough is a black hole, of which Despicable Me 4 is the singularity.

Director Nia DaCosta provokes some incredibly likable performances from her cast, and stages some truly memorable set pieces that are suffocated by a rote plot that only distracts from that breezy appeal.

Summering may be a breezy little trip through the nostalgia of youth, but its stabs at deeper meaning are woefully immature.

And that’s perhaps the most amazing thing about Lisa Frankenstein: its instant timelessness. Sure, it may be a pastiche, or a love letter to previous eras, or any other euphemism for cinematic recycling, but that doesn’t prevent it from being just as much a singular creation as any of its forebears, sidestepping derivative rehashing in favor of an original take on teen angst that isn’t bound by its homage.

Jákl’s film is precisely as generic as its title would suggest, and what little there is to recommend is buried under a mountain of tedium

Director Daryl Wein makes a commendable, if ultimately flawed, attempt at making a memorable holiday romance from Tamara Chestna’s anemic screenplay, adapted from the novel by Melissa Hill. Though it bears the appearance of a winter confection, it has about as much substance as an over-yeasted loaf of bread.

The moments when it succeeds at commenting on continuing anti-LGBT travesties feel like a landmark of queer cinema, proudly planting a pride flag in the horror genre’s fertile fields. Unfortunately, They/Them’s biggest stumbles come from a crisis of identity—not in its characters or queer themes, but in the genre conventions it employs, misunderstanding the opportunities its storytelling affords.

Insidious: The Red Door is not a broken movie by any means. It’s a comprehensible experience, though perhaps less so if viewed as a standalone feature instead of the presumably final chapter of a continuing narrative. But Wilson was tasked with telling a pretty dull story, both in terms of its visceral horrors and its thematic ambitions.

Easter Sunday, for all its faults, is still nominally watchable, but it’s a wasteland of unfocused potential.

An exorcism movie may not need to be compelled by the power of Christ, but something about it still needs to be compelling, and slapping the name The Exorcist on a screenplay that reads like a brainstorming session is just not enough.

The most frustrating thing about Prey For The Devil is that there seems to be a good movie somewhere in this patchwork of themes and pastiches.

My Spy The Eternal City is so unconcerned with its obligations as an action-comedy that it fails to either thrill or amuse, making it a chore to actively pay attention to.