Nick Allen

Thanksgiving is thrillingly pure in its nastiness and has more in common with ‘80s films like “Mother’s Day,” “Graduation Day,” and “New Year’s Evil” than its modern mainstream peers (the “Terrifier” blood bonanzas are an indie exception). Roth’s head-chopping whodunit doesn’t use “Grindhouse” aesthetics, but it’s a classic at heart.

This is an excellent display of O’Brien’s infectious imagination and comic energy.

It’s a well-made, purposefully ugly treatise of America as a broken-down theme park. But its charm wanes whenever it’s just not as funny, smart, or edgy as it thinks.

Even if this movie doesn’t achieve a great epiphany at the end of the darkest route, it offers a great showcase for Gallner in particular.

Jenny Slate and Charlie Day deserve better than “I Want You Back,” a leaden rom-com that gives them a shot at being funny, charming, and sweet, only to squander it scene by scene.

Plane rushes through its emotional and explosive beats so that it can get to the next crisis without having to fill out the previous one, and it wildly skims on the good stuff in the process.

Black Box is a little wobbly in balancing its science-fiction logic and some wholesale horror thrills, but to the credit of debut director Osei-Kuffour Jr., both genre elements have their place.

A Glitch in the Matrix is so much about conveying its big idea that it misses the smaller parts—it oddly seems limited in its overall mission, documenting this mix of philosophy, sci-fi, and religion without helping us understand its believers.

A movie as dumb and bloody as a slab of meat, but with Momoa playing an emotionally vulnerable logger who you also believe would throw an ax at someone's face.

There’s a largely automatic nature to this informative documentary; much of what unfolds here is depressingly prototypical.

The sincerity that Brie brings to her full-fledged embodiment of mental illness is major, and in turn helps Horse Girl overcome its tricky storytelling.

It’s playful but serious at the right moments and wistful, without being on the nose, about how growing up is the greatest adventure. Just like a bedtime story, Peter Pan & Wendy is poignant and fanciful, and it soars through its 103 minutes as if it can make time stand still.

Leigh Janiak's Fear Street Part Two: 1978 has more slasher thrills, but the fun of this series that makes it Halloween in July returns with an overly serious face, resembling something of a killjoy.

Never as fun as it should be, despite a gripping central crime.

It’s always a thrill to think you’re seeing one movie, only to find out that someone is working overtime to offer you a second, different one, and that’s what Vesely does when treating ghosts as an impassioned metaphor for gentrification, and refocusing his monster mash around what makes a true ally.

Even if White Rabbit feels like the ultimate acting reel, it’s albeit for a talent you immediately start to root for.

For all the nostalgia that comes with seeing David pop in a VHS tape, the movie’s time period allows Stevenson to focus our attention on the horror emitting from just one screen.

In the end, Shooting the Mafia is about recognizing Battaglia as a woman of immense bravery and unflappable individuality. She has seen a great deal of sadness in the world, and captured it in a way that combines art, journalism, and activism. “Shooting the Mafia” aptly conveys Battaglia's many layers, while exemplifying the power in not looking away.

Bad Trip knows how to stir things up, and its funniest scenes often involve real people getting in the mix, tested by the brilliant skills of André, Howery, and Haddish.

Italian Studies is a striking mix of open-hearted storytelling and atmospheric filmmaking, with an overall confidence from Leon and Kirby that’s more pronounced than the script’s slippery nature.

It’s all overly precious and just not funny enough, even if it is a blood-soaked tribute to those who would look at the story as just another day of underpaid work.

It’s antagonistic comedy that’s brilliantly designed so that nobody actually gets hurt.

The premise isn’t thoroughly uncomfortable so much as it is simply tedious; Barbara Hershey’s focal character Tabitha is made to appear more and more helpless in the film’s scant psychological thrills, and yet we’re stuck with a flat anxiety for a feature's length.

While Suntan is more than just a tale about an older man becoming involved with a younger woman, it's unfortunately not as profound when it later claims to be a statement on the movie you think you're watching.

It's more fulfilling to the soul than appetite, but the indulgence — if not the brief escape — is an inestimable perk.

My Zoe dares to lead with its feelings, and that fearlessness provides a striking spectacle itself.

The movie is inescapably lifelessness, unintentionally dumbing itself down while desperately hoping to be profound.

I Love My Dad is the kind of story that doesn’t overthink what makes it so laugh-out-loud funny, but there’s a whole lot of ugly, extremely human things going on each time its comedy makes you cover your eyes.