Luke Y. Thompson

After watching, you may well wish that Peter Pan could be re-copyrighted to be kept out of the hands of anyone inclined to make this much of a mess of it.

If you’re a fan of Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, scribes of the later Saw sequels and the Feast trilogy, you know what to expect from them: gore, vomit, red filters, and maybe a half-clever plot twist. If you’re not a fan, it’s best to stay as far away as possible from Unhuman, a cheap-looking, awkwardly calibrated horror-comedy which only the team’s truest devotees could love.

Without spoiling, this is one movie where it’d be extremely interesting to know what happens five minutes after the final scene. But while the subsequent events may be up for vigorous debate, the film’s message is crystal clear: Screw you if you ever doubted a woman afraid for her safety.

Childhood is hard, and childhood grudges run harder. The Innocents pulls no punches in turning that fact into horror.

Generally speaking, the best kinds of story surprises illuminate the material; the worst simply laugh at you for falling for red herrings. Much of what happens in The Twin bounces back and forth between those ends of the spectrum.

Vortex looks unsparingly at characters at the end of life, and finds their experiences as scary as any traditional horror tale.

It’d be nice to think that the forgettable nature of Memory was a deliberate irony. Then we could grant it bonus points for cleverness, rather than an average grade for just being bland.

Like the Despicable Me series, The Bad Guys may find ever-diminishing returns once the villain protagonists no longer qualify as despicable or bad. For now, at least, that mixed morality is not just part of the fun, but the primary selling point.

From the cast to its odd, intriguing locations, Sigal was successful in assembling many of the right ingredients. Unfortunately, they lack a chef who knows how to properly combine them, whether that’s to create a meaningful sense of cohesion or to truly create the kind of beautiful chaos that makes Lynch such a mesmerizing source of inspiration.

If the movie were just meme-able moments, it might run out of steam, even with Cage delivering them practically nonstop. Thankfully, there’s an actual plot, which allows everyone else (and the film as a whole) to spoof less Cage-specific tropes.

All The Old Knives is compelling moment by moment, but afterward viewers may have some lingering questions about what characters hoped to accomplish, or why they were involved at all.

It’s a compelling tale of three perfectionists who consider music to be their bond, but don’t work together very well unless they have to.

Even if the characters on screen didn’t become better artists during the pandemic, then Apatow at least should have. With The Bubble, he seems to have mistaken jokes about moviemaking for moviemaking that shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Stolevski ably balances art-house and horror tones to a degree that fans of both will appreciate, but like the film’s pointedly empathetic point of view, his emphasis on each helps fans of one style understand and appreciate the other.

It’s basically a high-caliber book-on-tape augmented with actual (as opposed to horror-movie fake) found footage — a missing link between full-on dramatization and simply reading the book while imagining visuals.

What the film doesn’t do, much to its credit, is make the killers into charismatically “cool” villains, à la Wolf Creek‘s Mick Taylor.

That some of the super-visions manage to disturb regardless is arguably a testament to writer-director Stanley Jacobs, but he’d have been better off keeping this as his demo reel and showing whatever he does next to the public at large.

It’s clear in their eyes that they’ve seen some shit—and this doc not only gives us a glimpse of it too, but adds valuable context in a way not many others do.

Blending stock footage, vintage audio, re-creation, and many testimonials from heavy hitters from Ben E. King to Van Morrison, Berns' son Brett keeps things visually lively, and not as morose as may be implied.

The twisty story and imaginative monsters are enough to overcome the relatively humdrum leads.

The co-director/co-writer team of Fabio Guaglione and Fabio Resinaro are none too subtle, and their reliance on hallucination sequences suggests a (misguided) lack of faith in Hammer to pull this off by himself.

For better or for worse, Paxton's performance will be the focus of viewers’ attention, so it is decidedly to the good that he doesn't just deliver. He gives a sort of master class on why we've loved him: Paxton was amazing in the role of regular guys, and equally compelling as the subversion of same.

If you miss the slasher icons of old and have little patience for the reboot attempts they get periodically, it's nice to see at least a worthy attempt to add to that pantheon.

It's audacious enough to warrant attention.

The movie is not without some appeal, mainly due to the fact that the whaling town of Taiji is beautiful to look at, and principals from the original The Cove, Louie Psihoyos and Ric O'Barry, gamely give interviews to explain that of course they want to hear both sides.

If you don't know who to vote for by now, whatever you do, don't see this movie. It's only going to tell you bad things. We're having fun here, right?

Director Jason Cohen (the Oscar-nominated short Facing Fear) wants his documentary history of Compaq computers to be fun — and indeed, compared to the overly earnest clips of Halt and Catch Fire inserted for contrast, the real slow-talking Texans in the tale are a hoot.

So long as they're only stupidly endangering themselves along the way, it's easy to watch this with a sort of libertarian detachment. It's also annoyingly predictable this time around, though the leads at first maintain their strong chemistry and essential likability.