Nick Allen

Try Harder! is a charming dark comedy with a light touch, with part of its self-deprecating humor right there in the title.

8-Bit Christmas may have a more grounded approach to gamer culture than you'd expect, but it’s constantly beat by its own limited imagination.

There are endless horror movies out there in which a slow burn seems like it's just killing time before it's actually time to kill. But "The Feast" does well with that dread—it's the main course that proves to be the rip-off, however gory, indulgent, and horror-ready it is.

Mayor Pete has a compelling subject, but it's most gripping when it’s trying to secure your curiosity, not just your future vote.

With its coming-of-age and its historical context, Beans concerns ideas of pain and conflict, but it’s too timid to really engage those ideas, to honor their discomfort aside from how horrific discrimination is (a few scenes of the family being ambushed by racist Canadian citizens are upsetting, but played too directly for tears).

The thrills here, whether you want to believe what Hypnotic is hawking, are far too mild to be satisfying for even a mindless viewing.

There’s something to making a prequel just for the hell of it, and giving it to an actor/writer/director whose charisma has worldwide appeal, but Army of Thieves could have had much more fun with the assignment.

There's an overriding desire throughout Night Teeth for it to be an L.A. story, especially in how its context involves snide comments about how the bloodsuckers run Hollywood. But the movie becomes obnoxiously superficial itself, perhaps most obviously when it includes Megan Fox and Sydney Sweeney, its two biggest stars, for maybe five minutes of screen-time.

Son of Monarchs, which is driven by mood as much as it is a metaphor that it can’t get enough of, embodies the equal ambition and shortcomings of a writer/director trying feel their way through science, while having as minimal a narrative as possible.

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.

Calling a movie like Madres by-the-numbers would be a compliment, and an overstatement, because that would indicate that the makers were even mildly successful.

It’s the kind of movie that might not be as charming if you’ve seen 100 vampire movies, but if you’re also curious about bloodsucker tropes, and the real-life world that surrounds its lead character, it has just enough of a soul.

Even with the poetic, vicious grin we can see from Brake’s gummy smile, feasting on the dreams of lovable people misguided by materialism, there’s far too little to fear, or think about.

There are simply too many moments here in which the characters, who we are supposed to care about in some form, are conveniently dumb.

No movie with Nicolas Cage, directed by the wonderfully weird Japanese director Sion Sono, should be this taxing, drawn out, and plainly boring.

The Voyeurs craves to be the most salacious, outrageous non-pornographic movie you stream this weekend, and that itself is enticing. But it becomes a nice bonus that while giving you some gratuitous page-turning thrills, Mohan also juggles art, sex, and death, and dares to go more than skin-deep.

Martyrs Lane is ruled by grief, often dulled and overdrawn by it, but its young surrogates give us the unique opportunity to see its themes presented without compromise.

Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed has a fairly standard talking head and archive video approach, but it has an inspired variation on the common documentary storytelling method of animation or art.

Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, this film fits into Marvel packaging in its own way, but it has an immense soulfulness that other MCU movies, superhero movies, and action movies in general should take notes from.

Nature is the most fascinating element of The Seer and the Unseen, but Dosa is more focused on Ragga and the elves.

In building this mystery, and in proving herself as a major entertainer, Joy always has something up her sleeve, including her savvy ways to suddenly spike the plot with a slickly edited fight scene that builds the mystery instead of just taking a break from it.

Blomkamp continues to baffle even more with Demonic, as he’s made a horror film that is so rote it’s hardly scary, all to showcase a developing technology that is intriguing as a sales pitch but unconvincing as a narrative device.

Slathered with a score that makes the sadness of each passage unmistakable, Pray Away narrows its purpose to be simply informative; it is too artistically flat to have the emotional peaks that would give its own otherwise vital message some dynamic, or make it more impactful beyond its very subject matter.

Jungle Cruise is a monument of zeros and ones, so reliant on CGI that it sacrifices jokes, fight sequences, and general wonder to the distracting notion of admiring how fake everything is, despite the truly incredible effort by hundreds of artists to make it appear as life-like as possible.

Midnight in the Switchgrass is the type of crime thriller that’s so full of cliches that it becomes one big cliche itself.

Old is so playful that even the finale has an extra nature to it; it gives you way more than you thought you were going to get 90 minutes previous.

Executed with the confidence of a victory lap, the last hour of "1666" is a series highlight, especially as it captures the brand of out-and-out fun that has made Janiak a newly minted crowd-pleaser in horror.

While this second round proves why the first movie worked, it also brings the now-franchise closer to losing its spark.