Matt Donato

Some films thrive on twists, while others compel based on meaty performances. Volpe’s picture is squarely the latter: an introspective analysis of the human condition.

A unique cherry blossom of a period piece finds its roots intertwined with an erotically-charged crime, set to shock and entrance viewers unaware of the free-spirited madness to follow. A cultural appropriation of submission, the male gaze and gender dominance, stretched until storytelling fabrics just begin to tear.

Belktibia's feature debut comes with compelling sequences as a mother fights against what seems like the entire world, but murky motivations hold one back from getting fully emotionally invested.

The horrors of childbirth become entangled in a demonic subplot as Huesera fits neatly into the list of chilling pregnancy horror tales, but doesn’t add much new to it.

Keeping Up With The Jonses plays everything so disappointingly safe.

It’s broody and disciplined, soaked in the pungent style of foreign auteurs who molded Scorsese’s own love of film – yet overburdened by a downward spiral lacking fire and unforgiving features.

Fifty Shades Darker is a befuddling, messy erotic "thriller" that shifts tones faster than audiences can keep up with.

The Covenant isn’t Guy Ritchie’s best, but standout performances from Jake Gyllenhaal and Dar Salim as bonded heroes save an otherwise bloated military thriller.

Evolution is undeniably beautiful, but it's a small-scale story which ignores a larger world that needs far more exploration.

Detroit is, for lack of a better term, a pornographic echo chamber of resentment. Trying to put out a fire with ten more tankers full of gasoline.

Your toleration of mother! will be determined by movie-going patience. Aronofsky is painting with some blistering broad strokes, but they’re just that – broad and undefined.

Beauty And The Beast lacks some of the astonishing visual prowess of previous Disney live-action remakes, but still sings and dances with enjoyable style.

Where Josh Ruben’s Scare Me soars thanks to tension delivered through imaginative monologues, LaBute’s latest is mostly benign chatter that rambles its way to an unimpressively expected conclusion.

Kurt Wimmer’s newfangled Children of the Corn is a rotten husk of a Stephen King adaptation.

The problem is that 40 Acres simply sprinkles its few unique ideas atop a shambling post-apocalyptic template.

Mileage will vary, dictated by your appreciation for methodical avalanches of sorrow driven by puritanical pressures. Everything is minimalistic, punctuated by the devastating context found in the research that helped shape Franz and Fiala’s screenplay. Some viewers will recognize dedication, others will have their patience tested.

The Outwaters is found-footage fearlessness that needs to be seen to be believed, but will be met by only the most divisive of reactions.

Bugonia is a film that tries to balance barbed sci-fi themes and conspiracy looniness funneled through Lanthimos’ trademark quirks, but it slips off the pommel horse on the dismount.

My Best Friend’s Exorcism is gateway horror that puts storytelling above terror. It’s steady on its 1980s teenage-girl friendship drama, but other elements around the messaging stumble.

The film’s themes may be fundamental in their commentaries on parental gender disparity or qualities about motherhood so many refuse to publicly acknowledge, but they still land like a haymaker. You’ve gotta hand it to Ramsay; she’s a fearless visionary when rocking on all cylinders—which, frustratingly, Die My Love only dishes out in smaller servings.

Doctor Strange is the psychedelic kung-fu spectacle that Marvel hoped director Scott Derrickson would deliver, but it’s got a strange problem – the doctor himself.

Lion may be a little too Oscar-bait-y, but it's not without loud emotional roars.

The Little Hours is saved by Fred Armisen and Kate Miccuci, the only performers who don't suffer from the film's one-note delivery at some point.

Performances are the spectacle, and both actors do a tremendous job translating the worst feeling any parent can experience. It all depends on your patience for slow-burn horrors, and if there's enough nightmare fuel to stay along for the ride.

The Birth Of A Nation is not without inherent power, but Parker struggles to evoke anything besides surface tellings of textbook atrocities.

The First Purge doubles-down on bloody opposition against true-to-life societal fears, but abandons the subtlety needed to prevent Gerard McMurray’s prequel from becoming anything more than hateful retribution.

A few images sear with the burning sensation of undead terror, but that only accounts for a few short minutes of an otherwise more-daunting-than-it-should-be cinematic exploration of death.

The Blackcoat's Daughter aims for lofty satanic thrills, but gets lost in visuals that oversell a barbed but tangled nightmare.

The Bleeder is a surface-value, party-first boxing dramedy that pulls its punches and goes too far into "charismatic sleazeball" territories.

It’s more than just a failure of a remake — it’s disappointing on its own standalone merits, too.

V/H/S/Halloween is an enjoyable assortment of vicious holiday horror shorts that might take a step backward after last year’s fantastic V/H/S/Beyond, but it’s hardly a throwaway sequel.

Gretel & Hansel is a full course meal when it comes to cinematography and production design, but the sleepy, hollow narrative pacing is just too stogy to overcome.

Casper Kelly psychotically spoofs the strangest of strange horror titles that turn anything into a murderous entity while unraveling deadly severe social commentaries. It’s abstract art, theater camp, found footage foolishness, hunt-and-stalk depravity — Adult Swim Yule Log is a whole lot of things but, even with a full 90 minutes, few angles feel fully fleshed out.

Conversational drama (ala Linklater’s Before franchise), plates piled with last-meal dinner fantasies, unparalleled improv – third time is still the charm, but Michael Winterbottom lets the stew boil a bit too long.

The Strangers: Prey At Night is a feature-length homage to Carpenter's best, and albeit familiar in structure, Johannes Roberts' execution strikes with brute ferocity.

Kaluuya and co-writer Joe Murtagh preach a message from the heart, but the inner workings of The Kitchen ring more hollow than the remarkable visuals suggest.

Missing owes its best moments to learning from 2018’s Searching, but is a bit of a downgrade in terms of Screenlife usage.

It’s never stuffy – J-Rock guitar solos wail over science research montages – just a bit overlong and too involved in the judicial process.

Us And Them might be a little slighter than expected, but Jack Roth's charismatic fire-starter has enough anarchistic anger to appreciate.

Storks is momentarily funny when it’s not boorishly and exhaustively begging for your attention.

Fantastic Beasts is both a slice of magical monster mayhem and severely underwritten storytelling, landing somewhere between “pretty passable” and “zany fun” – but certainly nothing fantastic.

Ouija: Origin Of Evil would have been better than Ouija with even a quarter of the screams evoked, which makes the tremendous jump in quality quite refreshing despite derivative storytelling.

Sick is exceptionally paced and provides slasher thrills with breakneck intensity, but loses traction during a wobbly landing that needlessly overcomplicates an otherwise cutthroat thrill ride.

Scott’s latest is a thrill-ride that blasts through celestial carnage, while building a bigger Alien world that might not be 100% necessary. Out of all the films in the franchise, Alien: Covenant has the least stand-alone potential – but dammit if it’s not a wild, warp-speed-killing-machine adventure.

Screamboat isn't a good movie, but it can be an entertaining experience if you only care about indulgently bloody kill sequences.

Captain Marvel is a recorded mixtape of familiar MCU beats that sets Carol Danvers up for success, but as a period standalone, struggles to be anything we haven't yet seen from superhero cinema.

XX is a mundane horror anthology at best, and a slow-burn experience that never reaches a boil at its worst.

Rarely is a performance so strong that it’s able to carry an entire production, but – thankfully for John Madden – Chastain wills Miss Sloane into relevance through nothing but sophistication, spunk and champion grit.

Ready Player One isn’t slick enough a commentary worth getting riled up about or distracting enough to hide glaring structural issues underneath a barrage of “HEY I KNOW THEM!” cameos like dangling keys in front of a dog.

There's nothing uniquely surprising or exceptionally rousing, which is a shame given the unfathomably dreadful predicament and an interesting turn of a performance from Dave Bautista. It's a film without sensation that feels like it's pulling its punches across the board – development is stunted, ideas lack passion, and the camera avoids visible violence – before the ending strolls off into the sunset with barely any goodbye.

Never does Soderbergh’s projection strike me as B-movieness or popcorn entertainment. His mix of arthouse iPhone Hollywood and downplayed character accentuation (by way of misrepresented screen shrinkage) makes for a thriller that fails to spike excitement via a villain who’s always right where he has to be.

Terrifier 3 is a bounty of practical effects riches that cannot be denied, but its storytelling is scattershot in ways that hold the sequel back.

Split is never as clever or poignant as it thinks it is, but James McAvoy won't let it be forgotten, either.

Kramer plays with surreal department store catalog visuals and body-swap quirkiness, leaning heavily on interpretive dance to convey meaning. There's nothing like it, but with such extravagant boldness comes risks, and they don’t always pay off.

Obvious and sometimes aggravating no doubt, but still effective in raising blood pressure given a backstory so instilled with old-school cultism.

How does a movie about the galaxy's most dashingly roguish outlaw end up being the safest Star Wars to date?

Holder's wayward romantic indie chases meaning through quiet reflections that navigate hardship somewhat cleanly. While it's a delightful representation of Brooklyn's playground, scenes flow through motions like a wandering observer.

It’s an odd “rock and a hard place” production about survival of the fittest mentalities that can’t help but indulge soapy relationship dramatics amidst an otherwise dire entrapment, which will probably leave most laughing and irritated at the wrong times.

The Void is a portal back to the 80s, hinged on immersive practical effects work that picks up the slack of a slighter story.

Annabelle: Creation is no lifeless dummy. Plotting may run a bit thin and coincidental, but David F. Sandberg whips up bone-chilling scares and hefty doses of peek-through-your-fingers imagery.

Daddio is a repetitive and reductive experiment in dialogue-driven storytelling.

The magic here is in underground experiences and questionable decision making, all twisted like junky copper wiring that’s unraveled into something more useful.

We Bury The Dead is a sprawling but sparse zombie remix that's too far removed from the genre it's exploiting.

It's a heartbreaking tragedy, dreamer's comedy, and saucy stumble through double-edged "success" stories, but most of all? It's a bloated, brass-band-swingin' mess.

Sweeney takes plenty of risks in a lead role that’s rigorous and emotionally demanding, but the film ultimately feels a bit surface level considering how it approaches horror.

The Rehearsal is much like any coming-of-age melodrama, and while its meat is a little overdone, its intro and finale bookends do make up for a lack of flavor in between.

Tetris tries its best to make a story about international video game rights into something infinitely more thrilling, with a smidge better than mixed results.

Allied is a prestige drama without the prestige, wooden in appearance and lacking any true drama.

Gudegast's film feels almost artificially programmed in its adherence to criminal caper tropes, unable to steal our hearts with the bromantic charms of cops and robbers with boundary issues.

Warren Beatty's Howard Hughes retrospective, Rules Don't Apply, is equally tone-deaf in humor and drama, cobbled together in ways that never seem to fit.

Gifted may be bogged down by some generic dramatic beats, but young Mckenna Grace is the beam of sunshine that keeps us from losing faith.

Bravo’s abundance of inexplicable details makes for an interesting conundrum at first, but mystery soon fades.

The corroded mineral walls, dehydrated trees, and all of nature’s other décor are wonderfully shot, and the performances aren’t to blame, but The Seeding just doesn’t have the storytelling mindset to protect its characters from looking like fools instead of victims of horrific circumstances.

Doctor Sleep is a conflicted and unwieldy sequel attempting to unite worlds (King and Kubrick) while telling an original story from yet another filmmaker's viewpoint (Flanagan) that never blends together.

Sing runs on some serious super-piggy performance power, even if the emotional notes are expected.

There are glimpses of comparably daydreamy thrillers like Come True or The Feast that give themselves to the fantasy of mania, but A Banquet fails to grab attention like these more ambitious companions. It all builds up to a cinematic Irish exit.

Here Alone is a sometimes-striking, sometimes-repetitive glimpse into apocalyptic drama that struggles to offer anything new.

Wildling may swerve last-minute into a less dense finale, but Bel Powley's performance is worth this fierce and untamed coming-of-self arc that's so exquisitely female-centered.

Happy Death Day is a generic PG-13 horror purgatory that's lived on repeat until even weaker motivations take us farther out of any semblance of storytelling thrills.

The Greasy Strangler is a perverted fever dream that will please few audiences, but those who enjoy it are in for one f*#ked up treat.

A Road House movie shouldn’t be boring, especially this boring. A Road House movie shouldn’t have to enhance its fight choreography in post-production, nor should it be such a tonal mishmash. I guess Liman didn’t get the memo? His Road House remake is an uninspired chore that never properly unleashes Gyllenhaal or nails even the most basic functions of bar fight nostalgia porn.

With Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, Tim Burton focuses all his energy on a dusty, far-too-droll buildup that's far from worth whatever short-lived excitement his finale brings.

I’m torn on Barbarians, because while the film displays sharpened technical filmmaking chops, it’s an unbalanced invasion thriller caught between its subgenre intentions.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson deserves more credit as an actor, because he's the only reason this Iraq War thriller hobbles steadily on two legs.

The Munsters is a wholesome labor of love that’s probably for the most diehard sitcom fans because for better and worse, Rob Zombie makes the Munsters reboot he wants to see.

It's a frustratingly one-note experience that boasts technique and potential, ultimately undone by a narrative blandness painted by numbers. Separately, everything works — the plan just never comes together.

Sting is sweet, silly and savage in sectioned bursts, but fails to pull everything into an intricately woven web of creepy-crawly terrors.

James Franco is a stand-out in I Am Michael, but the film's specific story struggles to relate on a broader scale.

Dear Joe Lynch, please let me see your Director’s Cut ASAP? Knights Of Badassdom is an unfinished product, but it passes based on the content our director was able to salvage.

This is just the sweeps-week Fast And Furious that jumps the shark, ready to right itself come next season – and it better. Dominic Toretto’s team deserves to go out in a blaze of glory, not a slippery skid that can’t be controlled.

Michôd’s military dramedy is more about press tours, TV interviews and power plays. That’s what makes this Netflix new release redeeming in its political poignancy – but having Brad Pitt doesn’t hurt.

Incarnate is just another buried Blumhouse special, and I assure you its neglect is with good reason.

It's a suspenseful family drama that drowns in the location's surroundings, unable to capitalize on its Shyamalanian influences.

Rainbow Time is all over the place dramatically, but somehow Linas Phillips ties together a sometimes wacky, otherwise off-beat family dramedy from perspectives unknown.

Zombieland: Double Tap winks and nudges its way through a long-time-coming sequel, but earns its survival badges when cracking wits around new casts of characters.

Murnion and Milott’s Bushwick feels like a John Carpenter film without the societal skewering. A nasty, hate-filled movie with shaky detailing.

It’s a sullen, trauma-driven approach to horror that’s far less traditional and reliant on human monsters amidst magical mysteries—not a killshot. This prolonged approach lacks decadent suspense or encompassing dread.

Song To Song is one of the more accessible Malick films as of late, succeeding largely in part thanks to a cast who plays their dramatic beats like poetry in motion.