Matt Donato

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.

Pet Sematary is proficiently tense, dashingly macabre and soaked in nightmarish tones that thrive on audience screams.

It’s a sweet, savory blend of oddball mythology and deadpan humor that’s easy to adore, worth many a healing smile.

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 a steely reserve and killer instinct, Extraction 2 thrives as a buffet of brutality that plays back the mercenary thriller hits with a fresh coat of camouflage paint.

Happy Death Day 2U is a more ambitious, more entertaining - albeit less horror powered - time-warp sequel that proves Jessica Rothe's blinding talent no matter what dimension she's in.

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.

Grab on for dear life and expect a freakish, wild, and seriously f#cked up ride from start to finish - which, of course, is every horror fan's dream.

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.

The Ritual may start on familiar footing, but trust in David Bruckner's ability to summon some nasty tension and a third act that horror fans will be talking about all year.

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.

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

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

Sonic The Hedgehog 3 lets its animated heroes shine. There’s less “live” in this impressively blended live-action movie, which is not a detriment.

McKee’s darker genre touches in titles like The Woman and All Cheerleaders Die are sorely missed in Old Man, which is too reliant on performances that outshine a story seen coming like an asteroid the size of Mars.

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.

Haaga knows what works, and ensures that we get heavy doses of the good stuff (although more Alisha Boe would have been nice).

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.

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

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.

Take Me is a sunny little daydream about fetishistic domination, spun around one man’s jabby little gender battle. There is a sweetness to it all, as well as an undeniable creep factor.

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.

It's rough around the edges when heavy special effects are required, yet proficient in shanty-shady tones and detectable darkness that hides secrets from one sequence to the next. It's an experience that lulls you in with hospitality and scored choral chants, plunging its stinger once you've become helpless beyond defense.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is a solid Guy Ritchie take on World War II that tells an incredible, sort-of-true story that’s plucky, punchy, and quite entertaining.

Alexandra Daddario and Maddie Hasson are the Hammett and Hetfield of Marc Meyers’ eyeliner ensemble, with looks that kill and attitudes doubly deadly. For that, this critic can downgrade other complaints. It’s full of amplified unhallowed fun and fiendish shocks in the name of rock n’ roll…or maybe that’s just what “The Man” wants you to think.

The Boogeyman is a capable creepshow built for mass appeal that gets the job done because at the end of the day, scary is as scary does.

Aquaman is imaginatively ambitious superhero cinema with no rules, which is more positive than negative as Wan's vision is realized like an underwater laser light spectacle that the DCEU so desperately needs right now.

Violent Night might take a hot minute to find its footing and keeps plucking low-hanging wordplay sugar plums, but at full strength, nobody's stopping Santa from making this year the reddest Christmas imaginable.

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.

Something Else promises monsters but delivers more demons of the human experience variety, as this sweet and sincere creature feature is far more romantically heartfelt than expected.

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.

The Sacrifice Game is cool, calm, and collected despite bringing so many subgenres to the party, achieving tonal unity that should please crowds and leave them craving whatever comes next for Wexler and company.

Hellraiser is a reinvigorated reboot that gets the blood pumping, starting with Jamie Clayton’s worthy Pinhead performance that sets a fresh tone with immense reverence paid to Clive Barker's works.

Life toes a line between underwhelming and just-good-enough, but performances help elevate an otherwise generic sci-fi clone with nothing new to add.

SiREN never takes Bruckner's original idea and runs with it, failing to capitalize on a demonic romance that so many V/H/S fans demanded to see more of.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die might explore too many plotlines or bolt between too many characters, but brains-free enjoyment reigns supreme.

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.

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.

I’m not sure White ever cracks his own film’s code, but you can tell he’s passionate about whatever Outlaw Johnny Black becomes. That conveyance elevates what could have been an even messier modern Western with throwback appeal.

Orphan: First Kill doubles down as a prequel about Esther but manages to feel so uniquely standalone thanks to some supreme storytelling swings.

I don’t love every storytelling element, but I do adore all that involves the star of the show, an aggro bear on obscene amounts of blow. You’ll get what you pay for, and can we ask much more from Cocaine Bear?

The film is mindless entertainment by way of scoundrels, dynamite and honor – not quite magnificent, but “The Watchable Seven” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

It’s in-joke heavy, tailoring an experience that tears iconic dialogue from classic predecessors and slathers on the meta-overload like popcorn swimming in clarified butter.

Terminator: Dark Fate is a good Terminator franchise entry by comparison, but still falls into many of the pitfalls that modern reboots/remakes/sequels struggle to sidestep when balancing nostalgia with hyper-CGI action.

The Dead Don't Die is a procedurally bland zomcom with little genre personality, playing as if Jarmusch invents a subgenre horror fans haven't been watching for decades.

Swallowed is an LGBTQ+ thriller that trades complexity for intimacy over a drug run gone horribly wrong. It's intense and thrilling at the right moments, capitalizing on authentic body horrors.

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is a standardized comeback that moderately succeeds in balancing tradition with reinvention. The film doesn’t kick your door down and challenge your Beverly Hills Cop fandom—Molloy knocks politely on your door and shows you what you want to see. It’s a humble nostalgia bomb à la Live Free or Die Hard, one afraid to upset the apple cart and detrimentally one-note. But Eddie Murphy’s still Eddie Murphy, and that’s like sneaking in a cheat code.

Once Upon A Deadpool supports the worthiest of causes, but "PG-13 Deadpool 2" is a much duller, hacked-up sequel than this year's *already inflated* R-rated release.

There's Something Wrong With The Children is an energetic but expected kiddies-gone-killer tale that wades into some murky waters.

Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker suffers the misfortune of having a director who cares more about digging up a franchise's past than moving forward with an original story.

Project Wolf Hunting goes for broke in terms of exquisite beatdown violence in the pursuit of primal genre happiness. Writer/director Kim Hong-seon executes like there’s a going-out-of-business sale on fake blood, and we reap the benefits as showstopping displays of action-horror devastation take center stage.

Bad Things wants to be quirky, callous and cutthroat before an explosive ending, but never aggressively combusts as we’d hope—even with chainsaws and flesh-cutting blades in play.

Unfriended: Dark Web takes all the most engaging and horrifying techno-horror qualities from Unfriended and wipes the cache disappointingly clean.

Annabelle Comes Home is crowd-pleasing horror entertainment that’s both fun and eerily frightening.

Destroy All Neighbors is a horror-comedy with a fun premise and creative effects but it’s messy in too many ineffective and wrong ways, like listening to a 20-minute jam session that never finds its hook.

Ma is a showcase for Octavia Spencer's ability to turn her typecasted traits into utterly disturbing obsession destabilization, but the film's less potent genre punch never lives up to its main character's psychotic allure.

In the hit-and-miss subgenre of horror anthologies, V/H/S/85 is a shining beacon. Filmmakers are given the space to explore a gamut of ideas, none of which feel restrained to fit a specific anthology mold.

Renfield makes a mess of its story at times, but does a good enough job getting gorgeously gruesome with its vampire action sequences to win us over with cartoonish gore – and Nicolas Cage's Dracula is one for the ages.

Dog Eat Dog is all bark and no bite, playing around in a sandbox of vulgarity with little rhyme or reason.

Ang Lee’s depiction of life after war (or on leave) is a respectful one not without derivative roadbumps, but honest in appeal.

It's A Wonderful Knife might make its points with steel blades, but that doesn't negate the saccharine earnestness that assures this one as a new Christmas horror favorite with a heart three sizes bigger than you'd expect.

When it’s best, The Seed is covered in slop and prone to psychedelic “romance” sequences where actresses writhe under and between the creature’s endless tissue flaps. It’s obscene and artful, on a budget that proves “doing it yourself” can still be provocative.

47 Meters Down navigates choppy waters, but ultimately manages to deliver some prime summer-time screams.

Murder On The Orient Express is an antique mystery that chugs along at 5-miles an hour without any turns that might jolt viewers in the slightest.

Ghost In The Shell is exactly the high-fi cyber shooter you feared it’d be, drenched in digital paranoia and concerns of network privacy. Visual fancies overload the senses early and often, only to hope the kaleidoscope artistry lingers long enough to overcompensate for back-end dullness.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter should delight horror fans raised on Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, and offers an R-rated bite of vampiric brutality for genre fans with a stronger bloodlust. Øvredal does well to transport his cast to a time when scary stories were told around lanterns in the dead of night, and even if the moodiness evaporates due to a protracted runtime and the foregone conclusion of Dracula’s landfall, the director accentuates the basics of violent feeding sessions in hair-raising fashion.

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is two-plus overstuffed hours worth of too many characters fighting for screen time that no enchantment can salvage.

Despicable Me 4 loses focus like a golden retriever in a Petco plushie aisle, splitting characters into bottled subplots that can only be addressed in single-file order.

Azrael is both familiar and unique, blending genre comforts with a risky idea. Luckily, it all works, paying off a relatively massive gamble that benefits from Samara Weaving's star power.

Where The Witch unleashes disturbed cinematography or Lizzie swings a vicious ax, The Last Thing Mary Saw is a duller distillation of the fear-based corruption that faith can spread.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is boggled insanity of the highest and most enthralling sci-fi order. As exciting and wondrous a summer blockbuster audiences could ask for. You must suspend reality (EVEN FURTHER) and enter a world where dinosaurs have existed for years in order to attain circumstantial nirvana, but if done correctly, an absolute wealth of ceremonious riches await

For what it’s doing and for how visually appealing it can be, Dark Harvest delivers October ickiness with a crooked smile.

Kids vs. Aliens brings gloopy, grotesque practical effects to a childlike sci-fi thriller that fails to shine outside kill sequences and costumes.

Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets is a fantasy adventure that’s nowhere near as adventurous or fantastical as it should be.

Desierto is one of those movies that's nasty without reason, and never really finds its stride by way of tone or message.

Ridremont succeeds in crunching bones and raising hell, all with a seasonal waft of cloves and corpses from behind a wishgiver’s crooked smile. It’s chilling, teeters between moral stances and is a hellish-jolly greeting that should please horror fans in the mood for merriness gone malevolent.

The Wrath of Becky is still a fun-filled slaughter-fest, even considering the lulls before Becky unleashes her fury.

Rough Night is a seriously funny movie led by some seriously funny ladies, but even more impressive is a mainstream comedy that relies not on cheap shocks like many who have come before.

An under 90-minute runtime does the film a massive favor, but Stanleyville is still an overextended last-person-standing confrontation of life’s ultimate acceptance that fulfillment may not ever be achievable.

The Accountant is so many baffling things, most (but not all) of which can not be described in a positive manner.

Reverse the Curse calls its shot with confidence but doesn’t possess the fundamentals to bomb a home run, barely getting on base with this out-of-synch heartwarmer that’s icy to the touch.

Run Sweetheart Run is a passionate Los Angeles marathon that severs heads, scolds abusive norms, and gets loud about the ways society needs to reflect upon bettering itself. Shana Feste finds action-packed elegance in rage and reflection, borrowing from fast-moving midnight flicks that aren't afraid to challenge oppressive stigmas.

Clerks III delivers all the inappropriate cuss-cluttered humor and pot smoke that is Kevin Smith's trademark but evolves his sentimentality beyond bong-rip wisdom. The third Clerks installment is a moving ode to working-class nobodies that amplifies Smith's touchstone sincerity above Randal's not-so-passive aggression or Jay's lit-for-days attitude.

Goofball rockstars created a silly, schlocky haunted thriller with their friends, and that’s the vibe Studio 666 brings. If you’re a Foo Fighters admirer looking for a horror-comedy, you define the demographic.

The Hunt puts the "F-U" in midnight "fun" as no sides are safe in this middle-finger cultural roast that's as loudly defiant as it is proudly blood-soaked.

War On Everyone is a pitch-black, nihilistic riot, like a pissed-off teenager spinning atop a mountain with two outstretched middle fingers pointing in every direction.

Bornedal keeps his surprises out of sight and boredom out of mind, delivering shocking payoffs that supplement the dominant plotline about Martin’s everlasting demons.

The Boss Baby is a movie made for few audiences, inconceivably inept in its ability to blend adult references with children's immaturity.

Cobweb feels like an incomplete collection of horror ideas that aren't explored to their full potential, but it ultimately succeeds thanks to deranged performances by Lizzy Caplan and Antony Starr.

3 From Hell is an ugly example of too much wicked style over zero intended substance.