Noel Murray

There’s not quite enough new or exciting about the picture’s demon-haunting tropes to recommend it. But the connection between family dysfunction and supernatural evil at least gives the routine jump-scares and vaguely spooky atmosphere a firmer context.

There’s something admirably bravura about Beloved Beast, which just keeps going, hour after hour, grinding through dry, tedious scenes of lousy people misbehaving, with no end in sight. This is a movie about misery, which makes viewers feel every bit of the characters’ ennui.

The idea of this boat as a last-ditch play to save a marriage is fine as an inciting incident, but it ends up steering the story way too much. Oldman and Mortimer play the drama in “Mary” well. Too bad they don’t get much chance to play the horror.

Despite the handsome Craig Wrobleski cinematography, and despite a typically fine performance by Patrick Wilson as the lost kid’s dad — slowly going mad in the bush — “In the Tall Grass” runs too long and repeats itself too much to be as gripping as its source material.

This movie’s a reminder that even abstract concepts can have a dark, persuasive power.

At its best, Cuck emphasizes those moments when Ronnie is reachable: when he’s treated like an ordinary person and tries his best to respond in kind.

The movie’s most memorable material is also more grounded.

This story of a lonely kid in need of a father figure seems stubbornly small, given the creators involved. It’s a premise in search of a plot.

Some of the stylistic fillips feel excessive, and at the end of the day, this is just a tawdry, gory B-picture, with little to say about human behavior. But it’s often funny and generally suspenseful — a fine afternoon on the water, all things considered.

Madison’s work aside, this picture isn’t all that exciting. It’s 80 tedious minutes of shouting, swearing, nudity and gore, cut together with the deftness of a chainsaw.

10 Minutes Gone is clumsy and cliché-ridden, and populated by two accomplished action stars who look like they just want to get through this job as quickly as possible.

Director Matthew Currie Holmes (who also cowrote the script) has a hard time controlling this movie’s tone, which ranges from tongue-in-cheek to deadly serious, with some well-meaning but poorly executed attempts to examine the racial component of the old Buckout Road tales.

The filmmakers sometimes fail to follow through on the more interesting parts of their story, but a novel approach to the material mostly compensates for the drier stretches.

This is an appealingly polished thriller, with something modest but profound to say about how selfish choices can ripple across decades.

Bloodline is meant to work on viewers’ nerves. For the most part, it does.

With an all-star cast that includes Nicolas Cage, Laurence Fishburne, Adam Goldberg and Clifton Collins Jr. — many of whom ham it up in kooky ways — this movie is enjoyably energetic. It almost doesn’t matter that it doesn’t make a lick of sense.

Even with an old pro like Shaye behind the camera, Ambition is too slight.

Poor Demi Moore — playing the self-centered CEO of a failing company — comes off as stiff and shrill, setting the tone for a movie that’s stilted from start to finish.

Even with the short running time, writer-director Matt Kane and cowriter Marc Underhill exhaust most of their ideas early. But Kind is touching throughout, as a man who just needs to feel wanted.

Throughout, Gaffigan is great, eschewing sentimentality as he taps into his frustration and rage — with no jokes in sight.

If nothing else, Hassan Fazili’s documentary, Midnight Traveler, offers a necessary corrective to the widely held contention that refugees have nothing to offer to the countries where they land.

There’s something just a bit off about Satanic Panic, a knowing horror-comedy with some wonderfully wild moments, but with pacing too slack and choppy to give its best jokes their proper punch.

Like a lot of recent South American and Central American horror, The Whistler is primarily a mood piece, relying heavily on deep shadow and rich sound design to spook the audience. But it’s a richly imagined film, drawing its eerie power from the depths of male guilt.

The biggest mystery in the serial-killer thriller Night Hunter isn’t the identity of a super-predator, or the location of his abductees. The real question here is how such a preposterous compendium of crime movie clichés could attract a heavyweight cast.

Boy Genius remains frustratingly bland and disjointed throughout — like it was assembled from discarded pieces of family-friendly television pilots.

Huston is outstanding, playing a broken man who pretends he’s fine, even as his rudeness and tics tell a different story.

Spider in the Web is slow and talky; and though it delivers a few good twists, it’s not really made for adventure-seekers. Mostly, the movie’s a magnificent showcase for Kingsley, who’s always at his best when his characters look like they know something we don’t.

The gothic atmosphere and the disgustingly gooey special effects are the main attraction. The existential dread is just an extra.

It’s probably for the best that The Fanatic is so terrible. If it were made with any actual care, it’d be offensive instead of just dumb.

A terrific cast and a rich sense of atmosphere do a lot to keep the Australian drama Angel of Mine suspenseful, even when the plot’s barely developing.

The new Jacob’s Ladder is less strange and scary, and more mindlessly action-packed. It doesn’t feel like a dream. It’s more like hearing a stranger describe a dream.

By telling their stories, entertainingly and persuasively, Bognar and Reichert make the case that they all deserve better.

The movie surely isn’t meant to be mean. But there’s an underlying sourness that makes Sextuplets much less fun than the pictures it’s imitating.

The acting’s either overly muted or awkwardly broad (with terrible Southern accents throughout, for no real reason). The slack pacing drains the movie of its urgency. This is a neo-noir that never generates any spark.

While the tone of One Last Night is appropriately breezy — and while newcomer Schank makes a wonderful first impression — in a “strangers spend a long evening talking” story, the characters should be more witty and wise, and not as vaguely defined as this pair.

A lot of fledgling filmmakers make autobiographical movies or lean on genre, but Low Low follows a different path, empathizing with the worries and woes of some people whose lives are rarely reflected on screen.

McGregor has a good command of horror’s visual and sonic cues.

Aquarela is first and foremost a spectacle. When the Apocalyptica music is cranked up high, and the screen’s awash in dazzlingly sharp, hypnotically swirling images of cresting waves, viewers could certainly take a moment to contemplate the importance of water to our global ecosystem. Or they could just drink it in.

Wicked Witches is almost like a segment from an old British horror anthology. It’s simple, direct, rich in local color and dripping with irony. But it’s been stretched to about triple its ideal length.

The movie was inspired by a real person but nearly everything that happens here plays as phony.

Lundgren can play these kinds of driven, tortured loners in his sleep. But he still needs a story worth telling, in eye-catching locations, with action sequences that pop. “The Tracker” has none of those three.

The film works well when it’s purely existential — just telling the story of a person with a hazy memory, trying to survive long enough to understand his own life.

Nekrotronic is “fun,” but often in an off-putting, aggressive way. The Roache-Turners have prioritized fleeting moments of gross-out humor and special-effects dazzle over a controlled pace, or careful world-building.

The setting and the characters are fairly unique. But they’re put to fairly mundane use, in service of a blah coming-of-age tale.

This movie is a broadly sketched but illuminating depiction of what happens when powerful nations grow weary of sorting through the subtleties of geopolitics and start letting heavily armed secret agents handle diplomacy.

The movie hits all the right plot points but never connects them to a story with any kind of momentum or tension.

Sánchez really has something difficult but necessary to say here, about how sometimes an oppressive patriarchy endures because the people who benefit from it — even if just marginally — won’t let it stay dead.

Without Cage, there’d be almost no reason to see the by-the-numbers revenge thriller A Score to Settle. With him, the movie isn’t just watchable, it’s occasionally riveting.

The three principal actors are all pros, with plenty of TV and movie credits; and they’re charismatic enough to be good company. But the story around them keeps changing every 20 minutes and lacks payoffs. It’s like a series of uncompleted writing prompts.

The actors all look like they had a wonderful time making Supervized, but the material they were given to play is pretty dopey, and way too basic. It’s an insult to superhero fans and senior citizens alike.

While Harvey does a fine job evoking the violent, character-driven crime pictures of the 1970s, he can’t quite make Into the Ashes feel original enough to be vital.

Thirlby gives a good performance as someone who finds it easier to remain a non-person than to make any effort to fix her life. But the more Holly comes into view, the blander her character becomes.

Just like the first Iron Sky, the sequel is frustratingly unfocused as a commentary on the modern world — and even more so as a story. It has the seeds of several nifty ideas, scattered loosely, left untended.

Flay is, at its core, just an OK indie drama about a bickering brother and sister, with some blah supernatural hooey clumsily appended.

Remember My Name still works magnificently as a tragicomic character sketch.

Crawl is action-packed, with impressive special effects and some jaw-dropping images of mayhem and destruction. But a movie like this demands more storytelling discipline and logistical control than these filmmakers can manage.

Not even a winning lead performance by Andrew Lawrence can keep this film from feeling as dreary and programmatic as a PSA.

While the story’s nothing special, the world of Desolate is memorable, with its tribal rivalries and sleazy black markets. It’s a vision of the end-times that disturbingly resembles the dying small towns of America in 2019.

The mystery plot isn’t surprising enough — and it takes at least a few good jolts to create the cinematic equivalent of a page-turner.

Once the machete-wielding brutes in wrestler masks appear, though, Trespassers perks up considerably. That’s what makes this genre so perennially popular. No matter who’s cowering inside the house, the assassins at the door make their story more interesting.

The parallel story lines are both about a twisted sisterhood, and come together in a climactic church service sequence that’s equal parts disgusting and grandiose — and kind of awesome, for fans of bizarre, punky horror.

Schadt’s dialogue lacks punch, and his cast isn’t charismatic enough to compensate. But the bigger problem is that nothing especially tense or exciting happens after the corpse is found.

Cold Blood is well-made but hard to warm to — although it might satisfy nostalgic Reno fans, eager to see him playing a silent, hulking assassin yet again.

A few minutes of this kind of moody existentialism here and there can add flavor to a stylish genre picture. But it’s much less satisfying when the seasoning becomes the main dish.

The movie comes off as too much of a grab-bag, as though the filmmakers shot a bunch of footage with no clear purpose in mind, then retroactively tried to figure out how to fit as much of it as possible into something like a thesis.

Alicia Vikander, Eva Green and Charlotte Rampling pump some energy into writer-director Lisa Langseth’s overly static, chatty drama, but are let down by a movie that keeps promising — and failing — to blossom into something more.

In the end, the most disturbing thing about The 16th Episode is how good it might’ve been if Cohen-Olivar had figured out how to fill the whole picture with the personality at its center.

In a way, Oldman’s presence is symptomatic of a larger failing: the decision to cram together a bunch of cool but incomplete ideas rather than spending the time and money to make proper use of just one.

As a slick, over-the-top action picture, Anna works splendidly. It features multiple jaw-dropping set-pieces, including a restaurant hit where Anna walks in with an unloaded gun and walks out after killing about a dozen thugs. The plot, while fairly predictable, is at least craftily constructed. On its own merits, this is one rollickingly entertaining film, that under ordinary circumstances Besson fans would adore.

It has a cumulative power, as Trobisch focuses on the small details, looking closely at a woman who doesn’t want to be defined by the thoughtlessly inhumane thing someone else chose to do.

This film engages and challenges the audience throughout, raising questions about the relationship between humanity and the technology we rely on. It’s an exciting film to watch, but an even better one to think about after — preferably in the company of a real, physically present person.

Only one episode falls flat, while two cruise by on style and attitude, and two are genuinely brilliant.

This is a solidly gripping and at times heartbreaking study of ordinary guys, out on the water trying to support their families, while knowing deep down — just from the shoddy condition of their sub’s equipment — that any given voyage is likely to be their last.

The strong sensibility and the unabashed sensationalism overcome some (but not all) the movie’s amateurism. The raggedness is part of the charm, making “Killer Unicorn” feel like the filmmakers’ deeply personal craft project.

It’s good that Wayne takes some chances with a familiar genre, but his excessive fragmentation effectively turns this movie into a 90-minute trailer.

Most of the first half of director Ellie Callahan’s supernatural thriller Head Count feel like a waste of time, made all the more frustrating once the movie starts to improve.

Daughter of the Wolf could’ve used a jaw-dropping set-piece or two (or three or four), but Hackl does at least embrace the challenge of shooting outside in the cold, and the movie’s moderately better for it.

The movie too often plays like a regional theater production of “Goodfellas,” marred by some hammy dark comedy and off-the-rack tough-guy dialogue. The passion of the people behind this project is evident, and appreciated.

Frequently, Morrison punctuates her points and her recollections with a warm chuckle, expressing the same embrace of life’s fullness that informs even her bleakest stories.

A pair of superb performances — from Suzanne Clément as a traumatized pregnant journalist and from Shelley Thompson as a suspiciously solicitous B&B proprietor — can’t overcome an excess of premise in “The Child Remains,” a well-made Canadian gothic horror film that just has too much on its mind.

This is another memorable Doleac effort, true — but it’s more painfully awkward than daring.

Fans of ’80s video-store fare should appreciate Barbarash’s commitment to making something this knowingly trashy. The film is only a modest amount of fun — but fun is fun.

To call this movie harrowing is an understatement. It’s a focused — and perhaps necessary — assault on the senses.

The cast is talented — and occasionally funny — but they run out of fertile material quickly.

It’s a little like a post-apocalyptic survivalist thriller, crossed with Lynn Ramsay’s impressionistic masterpiece “Morvern Callar,” crossed with a Radiohead video. Not all of those pieces fit together. But they combine into something strikingly original.

As the true purpose of the quest becomes clearer, Huang raises the film’s stakes, aiming for a profundity that he can’t quite hit — though he takes a solid shot.

There’s just not enough of that good De Palma stuff here. The lush Pino Donaggio score and some well-choreographed chase sequences only hint at the movie Domino could’ve been, if a great artist had been granted access to his full palette.

Perfect also shows that striking images alone aren’t always enough. Alcazar and cinematographer Matthias Koenigswieser have concocted some fine illustrations. Now all they need is some decent text.

Amanda Crew and Adam Brody give bracingly realistic performances as a grief-stricken couple in “Isabelle,” a supernatural thriller ultimately too sensationalistic to make proper use of the stars’ excellent work.

Even with solid supporting performances by Morgan Freeman, Robert Patrick and Peter Stormare, this movie’s just … well, sad. Twenty-five years ago, this exact cast and creative team might have turned this material into something to rival “Harper” or “Body Heat.” Now, they all seem slower and lazier: as committed to making a taut mystery as they are to mastering a Texas drawl.

There’s nothing especially original about “Assimilate.” But director John Murlowski and a talented young cast — including Joel Courtney, Calum Worthy and Andi Matichak as the plucky high schoolers trying to save their town — do at least keep the action lively and unpretentious.

Avengement features a good balance of colorfully profane British gangster-speak and intense, explicitly gory punch-outs.

These kind of indie neo-noirs can be little gems when done well. Here though, directors Kevin and Michael Goetz and screenwriter Michael Arkof have delivered something largely devoid of style or narrative tension.

A dispiritingly familiar story.

There’s nothing particularly awful about the film (title aside), but it never develops into the “Shaun of the Dead”-like social satire it strains to be.

While the “Wait Until Dark”-like suspense of the film’s climax feels a little rote, that’s OK, because the foggy depiction of a troubled marriage is plenty disturbing.

It’s a grim vision, sure. But it’s a compelling one too, using the flash of a space opera to remind viewers that — whether on the ground or in the stars — we’re stuck with each other.

A thin plot and a distractingly jaunty score hold The Bastards’ Fig Tree back. But for the most part, this is a thought-provoking historical fairy tale about the values — and grudges — that survive whomever’s in power.

This almost unclassifiable Brazilian horror film is one of the most assured, unconventional genre pictures of recent years.

It’s not the easiest movie to watch; but that’s only because Shaye’s admirably unafraid to tap into the parts of herself that weird people out.

The film’s well-made, thick with spooky 17th century atmosphere. But it’s also as dreary as its setting, with little original or exciting to add to an already limited horror sub-genre.

Writer-director Akash Sherman gives the film a handsome look, and gets two strong lead performances, but his picture still comes out too static and somber.

What makes “Tough Guy” such a good sports-doc is that it’s unusually honest — both about how much fans loved seeing an old-fashioned bruiser terrorize the NHL, and how that player's demons inevitably devoured him.

Copious blood-spatter aside, I’ll Take Your Dead is about as poignant as any movie with vengeful gangster ghosts can be.

This movie’s a shoddy copy of something that was pretty tawdry to begin with.

while the action stalls too often, the look of “Yamasong” is enough to recommend it. The puppetry’s lo-fi but remarkably expressive, with craftsmanship and design that puts most computer animation to shame.

At its best, Scary Stories explains why these books endure: because they let their young audience know that even in their worst nightmares, they’re not alone.

While Feldman — a veteran screenwriter making his directorial debut — brings plenty of storytelling craft to the picture, Know Your Enemy falls short of being as eye-opening as he intends. A strong sense of mystery and two searing lead performances can only counteract so much of the contrivance here.

Lobo overdoes the sudden shifts between the real and the surreal in the last act, refusing to answer any questions definitively until he has to. But the first-time filmmaker shows an impressive amount of confidence in his methods. He knows how to make audiences uncomfortable — first with tedium, then with terror.

Though Benjamin struggles to fill her running-time, the movie mostly reaffirms that she’s a talented genre director.

For those who can embrace Hagazussa more as an experience than as a spook show, this film is utterly absorbing and hard to shake.

Made Me Do It shuffles among different visual styles, as it bounces between its villain’s backstory and one desperate night in the lives of the brother and sister he’s targeted. The movie looks ugly and feels uglier, without much sense of a larger intent to mitigate the meanness. Koppin's right that his movie is different from a typical slasher. It’s far, far worse.

Thriller falls back on the old horror formula of bland, often mean-spirited young folks, getting slaughtered one by one … and without near enough flair.

The movie’s overlong and the humor’s too broad, but given that this would-be cult film is aimed at audiences who want something silly and trashy, it’s hard to fault Skiba for just mindlessly mashing those two buttons, over and over.

A Dark Place is earnest enough, but it comes across as phony. It’s hard to do a “local color” drama when everyone’s from out of town.

Despite how good-natured this movie is, it just doesn’t stand on its own. It has the right kind of soul, but a shapeless body.

Whatever the film has to say about the sketchiness of modern financial wheeling and dealing remains frustratingly non-specific. The characters all feel like they’ve been copied and pasted from hundreds of other movies that end with armed standoffs in some featureless field or warehouse.

The major failing of Division 19 that is that it’s just too busy, bouncing between corporate boardrooms, jail cells and insurgent camps, as though Halewood were trying to squeeze an entire season of a SyFy original TV series into 90 minutes.

There’s not much to this movie: just stunning outdoor locations, a soulful Rygh performance, and some raw sword-and-sorcery action. That's more than enough.

The Wind is ultimately more allegorical than literal. It’s not about history, or pioneer life, or bloodthirsty ghosts. It’s about a loneliness so overwhelming that it becomes terrifying.

A run-of-the-mill home invasion thriller, and while Farrands is a solid genre craftsman — as evidenced by his similarly creepy true-crime film from earlier this year, The Amityville Murders — his taste remains suspect.

The film's mostly about one grown woman’s lingering regrets over that one dumb adolescent mistake, although Egerton doesn’t let his more serious themes get in the way of scaring the bejesus out of his audience. The result is a movie that’s a much better riff on the Slender Man urban legend than the terrible 2018 thriller of the same name.

No Alternative is rambling, but never aimless. It’s the work of an artist meticulously recreating his past, while wishing fervently he could change it.

The two sides of A Vigilante are ultimately held together by Wilde’s ferocious performance — which swings between steely control and eruptive emotion — and by the way Dagger-Nickson frames nearly every moment from Sadie’s perspective.

In order to make the situation more universal and existential, Raschid keeps the issues and stakes so vague that there’s no way for the characters or story to develop. The film, like its title location, becomes just another featureless box, designed to agitate and confound anyone who enters.

Both a stirring sports doc and a rich nonfiction drama, populated by characters who could have stepped out of a Damon Runyon story.

The film has the eerie atmosphere and outstanding makeup effects of a good fantasy thriller. But it’s way too choppy to build any tension.

That diffuse focus — and a whimsical tone, bordering on the silly — work against the film. Perhaps the government intervened in this case yet again, making sure Finding Steve McQueen would be too muddled and goofy to be entertaining.

Never Grow Old isn’t a top-shelf western, but it’s thoughtfully made, with something to say about how even in a country that encourages rugged individualism, community matters.

While the European locations are picturesque, the cast lacks the chops and charisma to make this collection of killers and thieves imposing. Weight-room-sculpted muscles aside, everyone here comes across like too much of a lightweight — as if they’re just playing pretend.

Anyone who loves Dangerous Liaisons — in any of its iterations — should rush to cue up Lady J, a period romance with a similarly wicked sense of comic melodrama.

Woodsrider is often needlessly opaque about what it’s showing and why. But the sense of calm about the film is oddly relaxing, even when Sadie’s anxious about the melting snow. This is a contemplative portrait of a different way to live.

Winning lead performances and some uniquely quirky touches keep this dramedy watchable from start to finish, but an over-reliance on indie film clichés — from the plucky folk-pop soundtrack to the generic “dredging up the past” plot — add up to squandered potential.

2050 has a meaningful subject, but is so dialogue-heavy and incident-light that almost the entire film feels like a pitch for the movie Holt didn’t make.

Over-written dialogue and some stiff acting weigh Devil’s Path down, especially in the early going. But the action sequences are quite good, deriving nervous energy from the inherent risk of any illicit sexual encounter: that being in the wrong place with the wrong person could prove fatal.

Writer-director Roope Olenius (adapting a Neea Viitamäki play) struggles at times to maintain a consistent tone with a film which veers sharply between absurdist comedy and near-horror.

Dryly funny and unsparingly acerbic, The Cannibal Club has one simple point to make about the hypocrisy of the aristocracy … and Parente makes it sharply.

It’s always welcome to see a chiller that builds suspense from ideas and characters — and where the beasts from beyond are almost beside the point.

Everything looks strikingly fresh… and overwhelmingly so. In fact what stands out most in this film is the sheer scale of NASA’s Apollo operation.

This is a well-intentioned movie; it's just not a well-made one.

While it’s disappointing as a mystery, Who Killed Cock Robin is effective as the study of a compulsively nosy man who follows his hunches whenever they lead, into some dark places.

This is just another buy-the-numbers POV fright-fest — like the B-movie version of walking through a professional Halloween haunted house.

Thanks to a focus on the setting and emotions of the story, by the time the life-or-death action kicks in, Harcourt and McKenzie have clearly delineated these characters and what they’re facing — bringing Mahy’s words to life.

Unlike Medem’s best films, The Tree of Blood feels way too haphazard. It hops freely between timelines and characters, such that it becomes more of a compilation of sensual, stimulating scenes than a movie with anything in particular to say.

The simplicity of “Parkland” is often quite affecting.

Though it never rises above the level of “interesting experiment,” the dystopian thriller The Bellwether teems with so many ideas that even the bad ones don’t weigh it down too much.

From the exotic ports of call to the occasional musical numbers, Yucatán is a mostly enjoyable ride. It’s meant to be a throwback to glamorous old Hollywood movies. Like a typical American pleasure cruise, it’s a serviceable facsimile of something fancy.

Writer-director Matthew Berkowitz’s crime drama A Violent Man has all the pungent cynicism of a classic film noir but lacks the urgency. A slower-than-necessary pace drags on a movie that’s otherwise well-written and well-acted, and which makes good use of its setting in the world of mixed martial arts.

The effect is like watching a bar band do a cover version of “The Amityville Horror” — spirited enough, but hardly ready for the big time.

The Butler-Harts built their story around the place, and don’t squander any of the spectacular scenery. This island looks like something from a dark fairy tale — so that’s exactly what the filmmakers have made.

Kern and Hennessy are always incredibly entertaining, going toe-to-toe, as Mary defies the convent’s rules and a smiling Mother Superior makes her pay.

A well-crafted and idiosyncratic supernatural thriller, the film plays like a mix of “Frankenstein,” “The Witch,” and some of the Coen brothers’ more explicitly Jewish movies.

While the art world caricatures are hardly fresh, there’s a lot about Velvet Buzzsaw that’s pretty savvy and even inspired.

Zuhdi’s story is ambitious; and there’s something poignant about the way these characters’ roundabout schemes keep pushing them further away from what they really want. But the audience rarely gets to see these plans play out.

The film’s biggest issue is its balance between setup and payoff.

The film is unapologetically “low art” … yet fun, in its own way.

While this movie is pretty incomprehensible, it’s at least memorable.

The premise is effectively eerie; the presentation depressingly sloppy.

An obvious abundance of creative passion went into the two-fisted action picture Split Lip — a film that’s generally likable but ultimately too slight and derivative to recommend.

The Brawler isn’t terrible, but those with any interest at all in Chuck Wepner should start with one of the many better options.

Written, directed and produced by Vicky Jewson, Close works well when it sticks to the distinctive personal details of this kind of job; but it too often defaults to a run-of-the-mill international thriller.

The characters and premise of Pledge are over-the-top, but the movie understands that — whether comedy or horror — all these stories are really about a desperate yearning for belonging.

Director Marius A. Markevicius and screenwriter Ben York Jones fail to find much of a fresh angle on genocide and widespread cruelty.

Like a lot of low-budget horror, writer-director Matty Castano’s Alone in the Dead of Night is more a case study in shrewd resource-management than it is a movie.

Though Krings co-wrote and co-directed the film (the latter alongside Arnaud Bouron), “Tall Tales” lacks his usual gentle kookiness and vivid designs.

Too many scenes run longer than they need to, padded out with overly folksy and reflective dialogue. But McGowan makes good use of autumnal Appalachia, staging a lot of scenes outdoors in the barren, brown hills.

While “Worm Valley” is generally diverting, the plotting is remedial — and devoid of whatever personality Zhang brought to his books. There’s just enough story here to support the next big special effects sequence.

Mullan brings edginess and gravitas to the kind of role he’s played dozens of times. Butler, though, is a pleasant surprise, departing from his usual one-dimensional action heroes to play a dramatic part — and so well that one wonders why he doesn’t do it more often.

The mix of genres and the overload of characters are too much of a drag on the film. Waterston, though, is a wonder throughout, capturing the deep confusion as a woman whose life has been so upended that she wonders if she’ll ever see straight again.

Because of the talent involved, every now and then Holmes & Watson hits on something bizarrely inspired.

Like any good hoofer, the South Korean musical Swing Kids is eager to please, relying on both subtly graceful moves and aggressive razzle-dazzle. Though a bit longer than necessary, the movie tells an engaging, enjoyable story, peppered with impressive dance numbers.

Quale and his crew clearly want this to be a good old-fashioned two-fisted caper, but the pacing is leaden and the plot lacks imagination. Worst of all, nobody really bothered to give the picture an angle. It’s all straight, flat and dull.

The actor’s fierce commitment turns Between Worlds into another solidly strange entry in the ever-expanding “Nicolas Cage movie” sub-genre.

Even genre buffs will be disappointed by how minor-league this movie is.

A movie that very quickly becomes yet another story about people with guns chasing other people with guns, through featureless forests and abandoned buildings.

The story almost feels like an afterthought, whipped up to support the spectacle — and not, as it should always be, the other way around.

When the trouble does hit in this film, it hits hard, at which point all the investment in character pays off.

there’s something undeniably inspiring about [Groo's] stick-to-it-iveness, as he hustles around the Utah mountains, completing more movies in a year than better filmmakers ever will.

The characters, the plot, and — unfortunately — the star are all interchangeable with the elements of hundreds of other international thrillers.

Knight does a good job of establishing the political complexities of a more theocratic age. But then The Appearance pivots straight to the usual assortment of things going bump in the night, which — as it turns out — aren’t suddenly less clichéd when everyone’s wearing robes.

Hospitality is both an exercise in atmosphere and an actors’ showcase, letting its cast settle deep into the skins of these people who just need something in their lives to break their way … even if they’ve done nothing to deserve it.

Perlman has a physical presence that makes him look like he stepped off the cover of a paperback. He brings soul to this old hired gun, who’s become a creature of habit, mired in a daily routine of killing other people and waiting to die.

The movie’s grating a lot of the time, but often very funny, and perversely fascinating. Most importantly, it's always as honest as it is painful.

A stellar cast and a breezy tone partially compensate for the movie’s shortcomings.

Director John Pogue brings some grit and energy to the action sequences, but ultimately Blood Brother is just a compendium of pulp clichés, with nothing to say about these characters or the worlds they inhabit.

Default successfully turns a global financial crisis into a movie that’s at once engaging and educational.

The film’s as eclectic as it is eccentric, and it stays true to its own twisted sense of poetry, all the way to an epilogue that’s somehow even odder than anything that came before.

The acting throughout is excellent; and it helps that Barrial isn’t playing Leonard’s predicament for cheap laughs or amped-up drama. Instead, he’s documenting what it’s like these days, to try and find some meaning in life while scrounging all night long, terrified to miss whatever meager scraps are being tossed.

8 Remains has a cool premise, but director Juliane Block and screenwriter Laura Sommer (with dialogue assistance from Wolf-Peter Arand) treat it more as a metaphor than as a storytelling opportunity.

The characters and story take a backseat to the movie’s message — which is as subtle as a roundhouse punch.

The cast of Texas Cotton is good company, and the location’s a nice place to hang out for an hour and a half. But all these nice folks are worthy of more than such a flat, featureless story.

By the time the Tinker fantasy elements kick in, they seem more like an afterthought than the reason this movie was made in the first place.

With scares at a minimum, Astral relies heavily on its young cast, who are all likable and charismatic. Dillane and Idris and the others are undoubtedly destined to appear someday in movies and TV shows far more memorable than this one.

At every turn in Speed Kills, director Jodi Scurfield and a team of screenwriters sand the edges off a complicated, multi-decade saga, making a featureless knockoff of seemingly every sweeping true-crime movie of the past three decades.

Strong lead performances by Aaron Paul and Emily Ratajkowski are squandered in Welcome Home, a low-tension suspense picture with pretensions of saying something profound about broken relationships.

On a narrative level, Mazzei and Goldhaber don’t come up with enough ideas for how to capitalize on their hooky premise. But on a character level? The filmmakers and Brewer capture the mounting existential anxiety of a woman who’s constructed an entire identity on-line and is horrified to see that it can keep on living without her.

While the story’s a little shaky, Poots is outstanding; and de Fontenay has a terrific eye for the details of a drifter’s life, shuffling from hovel to hovel, never able to scrape up enough cash to sleep comfortably.

Skiles keeps the film’s pacing slow, which at times builds tension, at times makes everything feel more off-kilter, and at times is … well, just slow. Mostly the director and his superb cast use the extra time to explore the nuances of Ford’s tale of sick compulsions and social pressures.

Raising awareness of social injustice is a good goal, but not enough to hold an audience’s attention.

The cast is terrific, and kudos to Boyd for including some specifics about how 20-something Angelenos hook up in the 2010s. But there’s just not enough that’s new here — either in what’s being said, or how.

Palmer is a firecracker as the heroine, a young woman who has to prove she’s as hard — and consequently, as misogynist — as any man.

Like Agnès Varda’s similar 1962 French New Wave classic “Cléo From 5 to 7,” the thoughtful Here and Now uses one woman’s sudden awareness of her own mortality as an excuse to focus intently on the many moments of intense emotion that make up a day in the big city.

Mostly, it’s impressive how Bowler reimagines his own Oscar-nominated 2011 short film. He takes his original idea of using time-travel as a kind of metaphysical Photoshop and seriously thinks through how it would work — and whether it’s possible to have a “happy ending” when revision is always an option.

The movie’s too slow at the start and somewhat befuddling at the end, but for the most part it’s a haunting, poignant portrait of one woman’s Kafkaesque nightmare.

Mostly, this is a whirlwind trip through the origins of a phenomenon, with an eye toward explaining how America could find these ladies at once sexy and wholesome. The answer? Hey man, it was the ‘70s.

The movie is pretty lightweight — disemboweling aside — but has a fair amount of punch, and it could appeal to connoisseurs of self-conscious pulp.

Perhaps the best use of Caldwell and Earl’s limited budget is their cast, which also includes Andre Royo and Anwan Glover as dangerous men. They help keep “Prospect” from becoming a gimmicky mash-up and make it more a study of real people just trying to get by far from civilization.

The cast is talented, the direction is fairly crisp and the dialogue isn’t stiff. When the people who made this movie move on to something better, they’ll have no reason to be embarrassed by where they started.

The Dark clicks (which is often), it’s a moving and poetic tale about how neglect and abuse can turn people into freaky beasts, and how love can bring them back.

The idea of human memory as a kind of time machine is powerful, and writer-director David Gleeson and his co-writer Ronan Blaney make it pay it off well in their movie’s final 10 minutes. It’s the preceding 80 that are the problem.

Clumsy and corny, the film plays like a pat showbiz cautionary tale, half-heartedly reworked into lurid pulp.

Director Mélanie Laurent and actors Ben Foster and Elle Fanning bring some seedy poetry to Galveston, a muted crime drama that runs out of plot too soon, but makes up for it with powerhouse performances and a finely shaded sense of place.

Well-made but generic, the thriller The Super is noteworthy primarily for featuring one of Val Kilmer’s first substantial roles since recovering from throat cancer. Director Stephan Rick works around the actor’s infirmities, but Kilmer’s offbeat charisma remains unmistakable.

The movie’s artier components are imbued with enough heart and poetry to hold the picture together — just barely — through the more tedious stretches.

Bernstein stages a few good, tense moments in the film’s second half — in particular a skate-chase scene on an iced-over stream — but Look Away mostly fails as a “killer teen” movie. The pace is too slow, and the mood too somber.

An accomplished cast does what it can to bring the material to life, but it’s tough to add fine emotional shading to characters so thick and cartoonish.

Once all the pieces are in place, the film becomes a more conventional and less interesting thriller, with a single violent villain the heroes have to overcome.

If nothing else, The Church proves something: Better an amusingly terrible, eye-catching horror movie than a slick, nondescript, boring one.

This picture tries to encompass many ideas: about loyalty, the lust for fame and the slippery slope of immoral behavior. All of that is in the film. It just hasn’t been put in any particular order.

Ultimately, Ride feels a little like a drama class exercise, with the leads digging deep into their characters’ motivations and feelings. All three nail their parts. But their story never gets out of first gear.

For the most part, this is a tautly constructed exercise in suspense, set among striking-looking snowbound fields and farmhouses. It’s a vivid slice-of-life, even before the literal slicing begins.

Hell Fest has exactly one genuinely nail-biting scene.... Otherwise, the movie does little to update, subvert, or comment on the trappings of classic thrillers like “The Funhouse” and “Halloween.”

Writer-director Nathaniel Atcheson has found a clever way to tell a lot of story without many resources — although the end result is still more exhausting than enticing.

Maximum Impact is a dopey international thriller that’s fully aware of how dumb it is, This doesn’t make it a good movie, but it does make it easier to sit through.

The movie balances electrifying archival footage with useful contextual cultural analysis.

A heavyweight cast and superb location-shooting carries The Padre, an otherwise meandering crime thriller.

The creature effects in Strange Nature are top-notch, but Ojala has trouble making them scary. His plot’s too scattered to build any momentum.

Even when it’s considering a great man’s flaws, it does so with understanding, taking its cues from Q’s own philosophy: “You only live 26,000 days. I’m going to wear them all out.”

Gold does an excellent job of evoking the past. But there’s nothing really holding the film’s most poignant moments together: no narrative drive, and no sense of a larger world. This song has a catchy melody, but the arrangement is a mess.

The film’s appealingly twisty and easy to watch — though it’s ultimately weighed down by a generic plot.

Loving Mandy means appreciating what’s special about it from start to finish: from the psychedelic opening to the speed-metal finale. This film is a fusion of kitsch and pulp, underscored with a genuine spiritual yearning. It shouldn’t even be shown in theaters; it should be projected onto the side of an old hippie’s van.

The movie’s well-meaning, but also tedious and self-indulgent, with only brief flashes of originality — and even those are quickly interrupted by yet another explicit sex scene.

A poky thriller that — eventually — delivers some decent scares.

There’s an outstanding short film lurking within Diane, a sketchy, enigmatic thriller that writer-director Michael Mongillo (reworking a Matt Giannini screenplay) can’t quite fill out into a feature. Strong performances and some memorably dramatic moments suggest what might have been, had the movie been more focused.

The story gradually finds its way to a predictable place, but the company’s interesting along the way, and the scenery can’t be beat.

Thrill-seekers should be warned that this is more a surreal, nightmarish and occasionally sexually explicit trip into an adolescent’s psyche than a spook show. Yakin uses genre packaging for an intense, personal film, which many viewers may find discomfiting — if only because it’s so hard to classify.

Screenwriter Robert Rhine and co-directors Devon Downs and Kenny Gage have made something polished, colorful and energetic but, ultimately, pretty disposable.

Danny McBride is at his funniest and scariest in Arizona, a darkly comic film noir that works well as both a violent thriller and as a ruthless satire of over-extended American dreamers.

What the film mostly lacks is its own flavor.

Allen and Anderson are outstanding in roles that require a lot of levels and moods, as the central relationship goes from loving to shaky to … well, something else.

Between the punchy dialogue, the skilled cast (some comic actors, some genre stalwarts) and the impressive animation, “The Littlest Reich” is good, sick fun. It’s got puppets, it’s got gore. Who could ask for anything more?

This is a different kind of monster movie, no doubt. It’s beautiful and magical, and as aware of the real world as it is of classic Hollywood. Good Manners is a haunting tale of love — and the burdens that come with it.

There are more arguments than action sequences in What Still Remains, and though it gets more tense in its second half, the movie overall is a bit too sedate. Still, a great cast (including vets Mimi Rogers, Dohn Norwood and Jeff Kober) brings Mendoza’s ideas to life.

Director and co-writer Jason DeVan assembled a good cast, and has solidly constructed scare sequences strewn throughout Along Came the Devil. But even at its best, the movie feels stitched together from incomplete, ill-fitting pieces.

The Island runs hot and cold, with clunky comic set-pieces alternating with moments of genuine wonder and surprise. But even at its most misbegotten, the movie’s always thoughtful, examining what we value — and why.

The Forest of Lost Souls is a bit of a puzzle, which some viewers might find too much trouble to solve — especially given that in the middle it becomes shockingly violent. But the black-and-white images are lovely to look at, and whatever’s true or untrue about the characters, they’re all clearly alienated.

While “The Last 49 Days” is awkwardly bloated, it does eventually develop some momentum. Once viewers get accustomed to a movie that can move within minutes from courtroom drama to dinosaur attacks, they may enjoy the overwhelming spectacle of it all.

This is a powerful movie about human nature and how no matter where we end up — and who we end up with — we wake up each day and adjust.

A tedious exploitation picture not even sleazy enough to find offensive.

When the movie shifts more toward fright in its final third, Burns and Parker don’t have much new or exciting to offer. But with the help of a strong performance from Mann, they do a good job capturing one family’s feelings of brokenness, and how far they’d go to get back what they lost.

Is it possible to be a great filmmaker and not make great films? Steve Mitchell’s entertaining documentary “King Cohen” makes that case for prolific writer-director-producer Larry Cohen.

The movie’s derivative but lively and has a surprising scope.

The situation and the performances are strong, but without a good story to hold everything together, it all falls apart in the end.

No matter how spare and arty The Night Eats the World is, there’s nothing here that hasn’t been done before.

Roddy and Bereen in particular give fully fleshed-out performances, playing agents of a religious institution they both disrespect in subtle and blatant ways. Clarke and company inject some old-fashioned scares into the context of a deeper moral rot.

The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter is more of a wistful character sketch than a fully realized wilderness comedy.

Devotees of Sunset Strip rock decadence may enjoy the general seediness. Horror hounds will likely feel bored, confused and more than a little ripped-off.

The Lighthouse builds to a tragic incident and its disturbing aftermath, depicted with the dread and sick irony of an old “Tales From the Crypt” comic. But for the most part, the fears here are social, not supernatural.

What the movie does have going for it is Ricci, who in the past few years has become a master at playing offbeat heroines in violent stories. Ricci is convincingly terrified in a film that’s never scary enough to justify her performance.

The humor is often broad to the point of being shrill — especially once an eccentric genius nicknamed “Hopper” (Lee Kwang-soo) joins the team. For the most part though, The Accidental Detective 2 whooshes by, easily and forgettably.

The woodenness of China Salesman, coupled with the general oddness of a two-fisted adventure yarn about hyper-aggressive telecom companies, gives this movie some “weird cinema” appeal. But if you can’t tolerate stinky cheese, leave this one on the shelf.

Nothing here is revelatory — at least not to anyone who reads the op-ed pages or has watched “The Good Wife.” But the movie is refreshingly smart about how real feelings can get in the way of callous calculation.

None of this is as deep as it intends to be, nor will it strike science-fiction devotees as especially novel. But Sackhoff’s Mack is such a vivid, well-rounded character that “2036” still works. It’s like a stage play, crossed with one of the more philosophical old pulp magazine short stories.

Cage gets exactly one meme-able meltdown scene, about two-thirds of the way through the picture. The rest is a waste of time, even for trash cinema connoisseurs.

Believer has a well-told, entertaining story sustaining a running time 20 minutes longer than “Drug War.” With the extra space, Lee explores the motivations of his two protagonists, working toward similar ends for different reasons.

The film’s real strength is its plainness. Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, like Rogers, tells us what we already know in our bones about how we’re supposed to behave. Hearing it said aloud, so calmly, is unexpectedly shattering.

Johnson tries too hard to make all his mayhem meaningful, to minimal effect. Still, this picture should entertain Adkins’ growing base of fans, who ought to appreciate that the star gets more freedom than usual to be delightful as well as dangerous.

Every minute of this film is absolutely mesmerizing. It’s as if the stars are commanding the audience’s attention, knowing they may never get this kind of showcase again.

While the film features strong performances and good direction, it's still way too rote. A bunch of kids head into the forest and meet a monster. What happens next is just a matter of connecting the dots.

The film is impressive as a star vehicle, if a bit rickety as an action picture.

There's little in the underdog sports dramedy Champion that feels vital, aside from its star.

Co-directors Ben Howling and Yolanda Ramke (the latter of whom wrote the screenplay) sacrifice some tension with their more character-based approach, but the cumulative effect is emotionally powerful.

Doke's cast of unknowns has trouble bringing a convoluted plot to life. As it unfolds, Goodland stacks up more preposterous B-movie notions than Doke's thin script can support.

At its best, Another Kind of Wedding understands how hard it can be for families to look past their own burdensome self-mythology, to see each other again as just people.