Mike D'Angelo

Parental anxiety has long been fertile ground for horror, going back to "The Bad Seed" and "The Exorcist," and The Hole In The Ground finds a somewhat fresh angle on the possessed-kid subgenre.

As a primer, however, the film does the job, albeit less thoroughly and with more needless digressions than would even a lengthy magazine article on the subject.

Give Love And Monsters credit: If nothing else, it does at least come up with a new (albeit ludicrous) twist on the killer-asteroid premise that once fueled two dumb disaster movies in the same year.

Like many of Joe Swanberg’s recent efforts, Stinking Heaven plays like a potentially strong idea for a movie that never quite takes shape, which is the problem with “writing” a movie while the camera rolls.

If the thought of seeing a lot of people get murdered with automatic weapons at close range makes you queasy right now, Hotel Mumbai is not a film you want to go anywhere near. Few slasher movies have such a high, graphic body count.

Neither Ripstein nor his wife and regular screenwriter, Paz Alicia Garciadiego, succeed in unearthing (or inventing) anything of more than sensational interest from this tragedy.

Cohen and McAuliffe fail to distinguish their characters from the umpteen previous iterations of “sensible guy and his hotheaded best friend,” and the film winds up less interested in their relationship than in the compelling details of the smuggling operation, with which they’re only tangentially associated.

There’s just not much of real import in this quasi-historical semi-thriller.

What made this particular project so toxic? Simple: American Dharma is a fundamentally cordial conversation with Steve Bannon.

Had the film not been so open about its ambition, maybe its mediocrity wouldn’t seem quite so galling.

So it feels quite ironic that Ip Man 4: The Finale wraps up the parent series with a movie that’s comparatively weak in the kung fu department but atypically solid at killing time between set pieces. The highs are lower than usual, the lows higher. It all goes down smooth.

Keenly observed, geographically specific portraits of adolescence are always welcome, but there’s definitely something to be said for charging the genre’s usual tender lyricism with an ever-present threat of life-altering violence.

Once Sackville-West gets bored with Woolf and starts seeing another woman, garden-variety jealousy takes over. Not quite as fascinating as the story of a man who inexplicably metamorphoses into a woman and doesn’t age for 300 years.

Western Australia’s sunny, arid expanse makes Colin and Les’ endless, pointless rivalry seem small and petty, rather than deeply rooted in the landscape itself.

Belvaux has made a gutsy, discomfiting movie about going along to get along, and just how dangerous that impulse can ultimately be.

By the time Roman and Lucy seek shelter from a storm in an abandoned military bunker, Two Lovers And A Bear has turned into a horror film in which backstory is the monster.

A film that generously gives Elliott one of the few lead roles of his lengthy career, but mostly asks him to embody clichés, without providing any sense of how he might improve upon them.

Triple Frontier becomes a fascinating sustained exercise in absurdist triage, as one mishap after another forces the men to decide whether they’re prepared to throw away obscene amounts of money in order to save their skins.

What is successful, and suggests a promising future for the Polsky brothers as directors, is the film’s central relationship, which never feels less than genuine.

In a way, their continued ability to prank government agencies and the media speaks to how little they’ve achieved over the years, which becomes this third film’s subject.

The entire movie consists of this same delayed-gratification tactic, as significant events from Tony’s past are first teased and then revealed a bit at a time, via numerous flashbacks. A little of that sort of thing can be invigorating. Push it too far, however, and it starts to feel like a pointless game of narrative Keep Away.

High culture this decidedly isn’t. Mostly, it’s just a vehicle for two terrific actors to snipe at each other and poke some mild fun at their own profession.

A powerful final scene reveals that Seidl knew exactly where he was going. But the journey is stultifyingly static, repeating the same basic information over and over with only negligible variations.

Sunlight Jr. is one no-hope bummer after another, and it’s just not psychologically or sociologically acute enough to make the experience worthwhile. Watching anyone over 30 working for minimum wage would achieve the same goal in about 15 minutes.

Within the limitation of their roles, all the actors do solid work... but the movie’s tone is doggedly, almost noxiously sincere, verging on downright moist.

Every scene featuring Amy and Rat together is a giddy marvel of kinetic energy, with Roberts and Cusack seemingly in competition to determine which of them can make their character more unsympathetic.

There’s a sentimental streak to These Final Hours, but in the end (heh), it feels as if it’s been earned.

Rather than portray a turbulent group dynamic, the film focuses on the marital woes of one particular couple, squandering its novel milieu on a banal conflict that would play out similarly in just about any context.

Serves as a thoroughly engaging divertissement. That it comes across as more than a little half-assed is part of its unruly charm.

At every possible turn, the film chooses to take the dumbest and most reductive path. It remains semi-watchable nonetheless, which is a testament to the skill of its four lead actors, who valiantly struggle to remain truthful.

What makes this film more potentially enticing to Westerners than the seven films that preceded it? Two words: food porn.

The result is more of an interesting thesis than a compelling drama, but it’s anchored by Rains’ sturdy performance as a man whose open-minded curiosity about his new home disengages his natural wariness, for both better and worse.

Small Crimes, as a film, ultimately errs on the side of being overly vague, perhaps because there simply isn’t any plausible way to get much of the history across via dialogue.

It’s reasonably good, creepy fun, provided you’re not troubled by fleeting, uncomfortable thoughts like “Hey, that screaming bloodthirsty mutant monster could theoretically be a reanimated Anne Frank.”

In the end, a thoroughly needless rehash.

While the film runs only 77 minutes, that’s a good half an hour longer than the material can support, even though Workman shot it over roughly a decade.

On a moment-to-moment basis, A Perfect Day is reasonably engaging, mostly because of its novel milieu—there haven’t been many films about foreign aid workers, and Farías clearly amassed a wealth of anecdotes during her time with DWB. Trouble is, it plays like a collection of anecdotes.

They’ve created not a bold revision but a bland empowerment tale, devoid of everything that makes Hamlet great.

That Tumbledown sort of works in spite of all its clichés is a testament to the gifts of its two lead actors.

This isn’t the kind of movie that’s in a hurry to get anywhere in particular. Still, there’s no need for the journey to be quite so blah.

Like Bozon’s other films, Mrs. Hyde just comes across as randomly odd, throwing together a bunch of disparate, individually intriguing elements and hoping they’ll add up to something cohesive and satisfying. As usual, they don’t.

The movie’s period spookiness and its #MeToo outrage have virtually nothing to do with each other, diminishing the efficacy of both and making it feel like a tract.

Enabling and mocking paranoid obsession at the same time might sound incoherent. In this hilariously demented spin on L.A. noir, it’s simply honest.

This particular character is so thinly written, and so aggressively nondescript, that it’s just a terrible fit for her(Wiig), resulting in a preposterous wish-fulfillment fantasy with an enormous void at its center.

A non-professional making his screen debut, Paradot serves up plenty of volatility, but he never quite succeeds in making Malony seem like a kid with real potential that’s being squandered.

Dramatically, it’s not much of a movie, but if you just want to know how things went down, it’s certainly a more exciting précis than Wikipedia’s.

The problem with Heli is that “hard to watch” is its sole characteristic.

Marquardt hasn’t thought of a unique take on this predictable scenario, she’s merely done an expert job of disguising it. Still, the first half does function as a impressive showcase for her formal chops, as well as for Bloom’s gorgeously empathetic performance.

For every element that doesn’t work...there’s a moment that crackles with electricity and conviction.

Best of all is Merritt, a remarkable find who makes an indelible impression in his very first onscreen role. Giving Rick just the right mix of bravado and awkwardness, he’s like an improbable gene splice of a young Matt Dillon with a young Seth Rogen. Don’t expect him to disappear for 30 years.

Indeed, there are stretches of Into The Forest during which one could momentarily forget that it’s a survivalist tale at all… or even that it’s taking place in the middle of nowhere, for that matter. The essential becomes irrelevant.

Despite strenuous efforts, 24 Days fails to make the case that Halimi would be alive now had the anti-Semitism of his abductors been properly recognized. And since that’s the film’s sole reason for existence, there’s not much else to say.

The ideas are admirably heady, and Phang, making just her second feature (after 2008’s little-seen Half-Life), demonstrates a sure hand with both her imaginative milieu and her cast.

Solid, creative melodrama is nothing to sneeze at, but it can’t compete with enduring genius.

Schroeder was reportedly inspired to make Amnesia as a tribute to his mother, who left Germany not long after the Nazis came to power and never wanted to return; he even shot the film in the house where she lived for many years (which was also a major location in his 1969 debut, More). But neither he nor his co-writers managed to prevent their ostensible subtext from swamping the text.

The first Dead Snow included a salute to the classic Sam Raimi gearing-up montage, with its quick cuts and abrupt zooms; it was a cute nod, but nothing more. Red Vs. Dead does the same thing, but concludes the montage with a long, static shot of the Zombie Squad watching as the cash register at the hardware store churns out an endless receipt for all the tools they’ve purchased. That’s an actual joke, which is what the first movie lacked.

In the end, it’s Salvo itself that’s murky and obscure.

Valley Of Love is at its best when it wanders away from its ostensible premise and just lets two old pros connect, riffing lightly on our knowledge of their real-life histories.

There are enough giddy highs that it’s had a strong cult following ever since its release in 1963.

A mid-film montage of nipples squirting milk high into the air like the Bellagio fountains shows Ben-Ari has a sense of style and humor, but her general approach is tediously earnest, resulting in a documentary with such niche appeal (just parents with breastfeeding problems, basically) that it belongs on a library’s self-help shelf.

It’s as if a first-rate Roman Polanski movie suddenly metamorphosed (ohhh, frogs, duh) into a third-rate Michael Crichton adaptation.

Operation Finale means to embody the banality of evil, but it’s mostly mired in plain old banality.

Viewed as any sort of follow-up to "Beasts," Troop Zero looks like a sellout. By the standards of mainstream live-action children’s fare, however, it’s more mature and thoughtful than average. Just don’t expect any Oscar nominations, even for recent winners like Davis and Janney.

The 100-Year-Old Man surely won’t conquer the U.S. box office, but it’s a nice change of pace to see a foreign film that isn’t deadly serious. We could use more subtitled belly laughs.

The only way to enjoy this movie is to concentrate on its frequently stunning compositions and ignore the fact that none of it makes even a tiny lick of sense.

With no compelling characters in sight, and a director whose formal acumen begins and ends with forbidding locations (in this case, underwater), Pioneer has to lean on its drab story.

Dean turns out to be quite touching, in retrospect. If only it were funny, clever, or in any other way particularly inspired from moment to moment.

A duly serious and ambitious fall movie that, despite the best efforts of its formidable director and cast, can’t remotely match the excitement of real life.

Unfortunately, Penance is an example of a TV movie that definitely belongs on the small screen, to be watched piecemeal over the course of several days. Consumed in one gigantic, four-and-a-half-hour gulp, it becomes painfully repetitive and monotonous.

Casting two great actors as doctor and patient helps a little.

Bob Byington’s fifth feature — his best-known previous film was 2009’s equally gormless "Harmony And Me" — will play like the worst kind of performance art, in which contempt for conventional entertainment functions like a badge of integrity. You have to work pretty damn hard to make Nick Offerman this unfunny.

He’s (Mayer) assembled a terrific cast and mostly stayed out of their way, but the result still feels frustratingly arm’s-length, lacking the odd electricity of Louis Malle’s semi-staged "Vanya On 42nd Street."

Perhaps Turturro felt nobody would want to see (or finance) a simple, quiet film about a gallant Italian and a Hasidic widow, minus the high-concept gigolo angle. But in making the story more marketing-friendly, he’s undermined its sweet soul.

Fanning and Hawkes are both great actors, but they can only do so much with Low Down’s familiar, monotonous cycle of recovery and relapse.

Beneath the surface outrageousness lies a surprisingly, satisfyingly dark little fable about the essentially cannibalistic nature of artistic inspiration.

Only those looking to have their bleak worldview painfully confirmed will find this exercise in masochism fulfilling.

Does a pretty good job at keeping the jokes wry and low-key, with just a few detours into broader, Will Ferrell-ish territory.

These characters are so richly drawn, and inhabit such a precise milieu, that they deserved a less perfunctory, anticlimactic fate. The truth will allegedly set us free, but it often puts filmmakers in chains.

In short, this is fundamentally a movie of surface pleasures, placing gorgeous actors in an equally stunning location and letting them parry with sharp words and lithe, angular bodies.

The film’s biggest drawback is its essentially passive nature, which prevents it from ever building to a crescendo.

Finch’s main problem is its amiable, low-key vibe, which feels at odds with such a grim scenario.

Horror fans who’ve wondered what Bruckner might do with an entire movie of his own will be disappointed by his solo feature-length debut, The Ritual, which attempts to put a twist on the Blair Witch formula but demonstrates surprisingly little imagination.

Director and co-writer Zack Parker (Scalene) combines a Hitchcockian penchant for disorientation with a Brian De Palma-esque formal bravado, and he’s made the rare film that’s impossible to peg all the way up to its final minutes—a truly unnerving study in multiple pathologies.

This latest film isn’t entirely successful — Pizzolatto’s book stubbornly resists first-time screenwriter Jim Hammett’s efforts to reshape its narrative for the screen — but it confirms Laurent as a significant talent behind the lens, particularly adept at building queasy tension.

Clea DuVall makes her debut here as writer-director, and after two decades in front of the camera, she knows actors — but the movie’s stifling familiarity prevents it from making much of an impact.

May In The Summer just never distinguishes itself in any way that isn’t superficial.

Suspense can be riveting, but 3 Hearts really needed to deploy its bomb much earlier. When it does goes off, it’s a dud.

There’s no reason why this couldn’t have been good hokey pseudo-historical fun along the lines of, say, The Imitation Game. (Let’s just ignore that some folks perceived that film as Oscar-worthy.) All it required was putting the exceptional character front and center throughout, rather than shrouding his gift in pointlessly vague mystery.

More and more, the film’s incisive realism seems at war with its ludicrous plot, until both finally just collapse, exhausted.

Escobar: Paradise Lost employs this structure in a way that divides the movie neatly in half: one hour of tedious expository flashback followed by one hour of solidly exciting present-tense thriller action.