Richard Whittaker

Sarnoski’s script doesn’t needlessly insert darkness into Robin Hood. It’s always been there, and his version of the outlaw is in communion with all those other retellings.

If anything, the collaboration between González-Sola, Mumenthaler, and Sandru is a case study of how the elements of cinema fuse together to become what Roger Ebert so aptly dubbed an empathy machine.

It’s a depiction of young love, of universally recognizable awkward fumbling and fragile hopes. It might even lead a few viewers to a moment of understanding and empathy alongside their jump scares, and that seems to be Chiarella’s real intention.

Tanagaki enters the upper ranks of action directors with The Furious. Yet just as he’s adept at melding wildly different martial arts disciplines into one breathtaking whole, he manages to meld those mawkish aspects into the action to create a story that’s oddly wholesome.

[Spielberg] is, after all, the master of wow, and Disclosure Day is a perfect example of his ability to bypass the logic centers of the brain and go straight for the sense of wonder.

As with Carney’s other music movies, the songs aren’t special because of their catchiness but because of their meaning. While Rick hectors Danny into doing the right thing, the question becomes about what the right thing even is. Plus, as always, Carney’s ear for a genuinely good tune is peerless. Rock on.

Tuner may not be innovative, nor does it distract the audience with too many twiddly bits. Yet there’s a definite delight in hearing the right notes played in the right order.

The inner tension of Backrooms is between mystery and explanation. The series is often more about Async than it is about the actual rooms, allowing it to remain somewhat open-ended. But a film has to give at least some clarity, and Backrooms is torn between its own enthralling enigma and that narrative necessity.

It’s like Jillian Michaels directing an adaptation of Stephen King’s Thinner, and even some good scares can’t disguise the bitter taste it might leave in your mouth.

It’s an inevitable problem with the screenlife format, to find a way to keep this deluge of pop-ups and cutaways all interesting without the audience’s POV ever leaving a desktop screen.

Robin doesn’t make a definitive statement about the science of the hunt, but after the audience gets snake-struck, staring into those strange nictitating eyes, they’ll have no doubts about which species is the real mass-murdering interloper.

It’s in how Harris depicts the seemingly psychic bond between the sisters for silent conversation. In those sequences, she plays the same kind of cunning games with layout and design that she did in the published text of the script, showing a raw ingenuity that adapts the stylistic possibilities of the stage for the more realistic setting of the screen.

Like any great funfair ride designer, it’s Barker’s grasp of pacing, of when to lull and when to launch, that makes Obsession such a terrifying blast.

Even among all the fictions, audiences will find more truths about modern Russia than they’ll get from most news broadcasts.

There are moments in the bleak social commentary of The School Duel that make it clear that satire is dead. Or rather, that the extremity of what is happening in American culture is so grotesque that it’s almost impossible to push into the realm of absurdist commentary.

Léger and Robichaud’s update is mostly successful in filtering the intent of the original for modern sensibilities, not least in the plentiful sex scenes.

As Bauman falls deeper and deeper into the mysteries of Bilberry Inn, McCarthy masterfully reminds us that a ghost can be real and a metaphor, as the scares demand.

The tonal disconnect between the subtext and the delivery leaves this Animal Farm wobbling like the first time Napoleon tries to walk on two legs.

Mārama is arguably at its most effective as a political text when it isn’t trying so hard to be part of the heritage that includes Hitchcock’s Rebecca and del Toro’s Crimson Peak.

It’s an adept translation that is in turns bloody and cruel, insightful and hilarious, and, under the plentiful gore and uproarious laughter, a surprisingly touching drama. Just one with slapstick bloodbath tendencies.

Lowery may have dealt with the uncanny in A Ghost Story, but the whole point of that film was the mundanity of the afterlife. This is a truly supernatural tale, and the storytelling transitions into his version of horror, abstract and oblique.

It may well be that Ozon has made the best possible conventional adaptation of the book. Yet maybe it requires a more unconventional touch to truly translate Camus’ point.

A few unforgivably heavy-handed nods to The Shining aside, [Kawamura] has created a fresh new addition to contemporary J-horror, one that deftly warps the characters around its own rules without rendering them merely props for the next shock.

Faces of Death is dull and thoughtless, its attempts to smash influencer culture into voyeurism feeling artificial.

For two filmmakers best known for their comedic scripts like the Jump Street films and The Lego Movie, they know when to pull back on the humor and instead embrace the spectacle, and find their perfect proxy in Gosling.

A testament to the adage that a good filmmaker can make anything out of nothing, Undertone should go in your playlist now.

There are flashes of greatness, especially when Gyllenhaal and cinematographer Lawrence Sher capture some of the film’s wilder set-pieces. But then the narrative messiness undercuts the beauty of those images.

It becomes a warm and insightful tribute to every kid that finds peace climbing up a tree, to every adult that realizes the value of the natural world, and to the ties that bind us to the world around us. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll learn what a keystone species is.