Matt Donato

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.

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.

Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark is gateway horror that treats intended audiences to many a scream, pulling no punches nor watering down nightmarish conjurings that remind how healthy fearful emotions can be at any age.

Birds of Prey proves that it's no longer a man's world, it's Harley Quinn's - and we should be so lucky.

Like Me is a bombastic feature debut for Robert Mockler, benefitting heavily from visual artistry and Addison Timlin's strong performance.

While its minimalist approach keys into creepy unknown anxieties about our extraterrestrial neighbors, Duffield’s signature dose of emotional heft floats away into the clouds this time around.

Tom George succeeds in telling an excitably ambiguous case within a self-deprecating whodunit satire, even when employing the easiest tricks in the manual.

Glorious might not save the world, yet it's still a wonderful way to pass the time while humanity as we know it is devoured by threats we'll never comprehend.

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

Yes, the movie where a girl falls in love with a Tilt-A-Whirl says more about self-assurance, romantic wilds, and personal comforts than most human-on-human counterparts.

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.

What Backcountry did for campfire creature attacks Killing Ground does for murderous bushmen in the same setting.

See for Me positions itself as an unfair tale of “easy target versus evil men,” but highlights its strongest material when valuing people beyond their disabilities.

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

Little Monsters is a must-see horror comedy that proves Lupita Nyong'o should be starring in far more horror movies than she's been offered at this point.

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.

Terrifier 2 rips, tears, hacks, shreds, butchers, disembowels, decapitates, devours, pulverizes, tenderizes, slices, dices, skewers — I'm missing plenty — and knock-em-out-dead eviscerates the current competition when it comes to low-budget slasher effects.

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.

Grant packs plenty into Torn Hearts’ double-barrel approach, and assures herself as a director who knows her way around a joyfully dark midnighter romp. It’s a sinister and fork-tongued tune that holds a nutty tempo, sure to delight audiences who are into hootin’ and hollerin’ at some honky-tonk horrors.

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

Beyond The Games plays to the nostalgia crowd instead of adopting 21st century scares, but still finds a way to explore untapped VHS potential.

The Gutter demands that you’re on its wavelength, but once you’re there, it’s like continual machine gun fire the way jokes and sight gags fly off the screen.

There’s nothing exceptionally freaky outside one or two practical effects of bodily implications, and yet Good Madam still finds nationally significant ways to summon societal fears.

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.