Richard Whittaker

At a time when everyone is complaining about superhero fatigue, it seems almost perverse to say that maybe the Fantastic Four should have had another film first. Instead, they rush to an ending that bolts them so neatly into the greater continuity.

I will admit, the fact that Oklahoma oddball Mickey Reece had recently become the cinematic flavor of the month left me cold and baffled, especially with his breakout festival hit Climate of the Hunter. Yet the excellence of religious chiller Agnes finally means you can mark me as a true believer.

Adapting the graphic novel The One Hundred Nights of Hero by Isabel Greenberg, writer/director Julia Jackman creates a fable that is still damningly important and relevant: that women are not allowed to control their own bodies or their own stories.

Originality is what made Alvarez famous. If only he showed more of it here when it comes to storytelling, not just innovative jump scares.

In his debut feature as a director, The Valhalla Murders creator Thordur Palsson lets the icy-blue pitilessness of the inhospitable Westfjords permeate every frame and every moment.

The pleasures are in watching Maxine navigate through the bloodshed to the denouement she deserves, and watching West cut into the seductive allure of cinema.

In the immediate post-Roe era, any discussion of abortion is going to be timely. But what gives Cherry life beyond this moment is that central idea of facing change, and realizing that not making a decision is in itself a decision. There's something heartwarming in it being less important what choice Cherry makes than in watching her try to make it for the right reasons.

It may stumble into heavy-handed moralizing around the checkout, but Slaxx is definitely a good look.

As the energy-beam projecting, space-flying defender of the underdog, Brie Larson has captured the pugnacious, charming, steely Captain Marvel in the ways she deserves.

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

Honestly, this may be the only horror film that invokes Red Shoe Diaries and Cthulhu equally.

Meet Me in the Bathroom is like a well-curated sampler CD of the scene. It's cool, but you'll be left wanting full albums of the bands you liked anyway.

It's Gillies' performance that raises Coming Home in the Dark from fascinating to utterly chilling, complimenting Matt Henley's cold, angular cinematography and John Gibson's score, all reed instruments and long, clean draws over strings, like an icy wind blowing slow through dead grass and bones.

Try as he might to capture the political complexities of their relationship and how it was sacrificed because of the needs for an heir, Scott tells rather than shows (much as Napoleon's much-harped-upon mommy issues turn out to be a narrative and thematic dead end). It's all strategy, no tactics.

Obsession is what they call it when you're wrong. When you're right, it's called conviction, and that's the story behind The Lost King, the remarkable, charming, and true-ish tale of Philippa Langley (Hawkins), the amateur historian who made one of the most important archeological discoveries of the century.

The best moments are when Keery and Campbell get to be blue collar schlubs facing down these messy menaces. Maybe if there was more of their back-and-forth and less of Neeson and Torchia’s distant double act, or vice versa, then Cold Storage might balance between its gruesome and goofy aspects.

While there is undoubted visual spectacle to All You Need Is Kill, Kido’s rewriting of Rita and Kaiji as just ordinary people stuck in extraordinary circumstances is grounded in their mundanity.

There’s none of the visceral artfulness that Scott managed in the original. Quite simply, if you can’t make man-on-baboon hand-to-hand combat interesting, why do you think you can make a sword fight fun?

Just like the best of the 1980s actioneers, Nobody has just the right mix of brains, brawn, and gut-busting laughs.

There’s an insufferable longwindedness to Kinds of Kindness, each installment dragging on beyond the point of patience. Watching becomes a chore, made heavier by Robbie Ryan’s often flat cinematography and the pacing created by Lanthimos’ longtime editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis.

Most importantly, Sherman and Abbasi deflate the myth that has dominated the last decade, that somehow Trump is some kind of aberration from the historical Republican Party, perverting it to his will.

This is not some whacked-out drug trip movie, or scolding afterschool anti-drug special. This is anti-psychedelia, grounded in the strangeness of true life.

In her first feature, Bleed With Me, director Amelia Moses used vampirism as a tool to explore toxic friendships: in Bloodthirsty, it's clear that the lycanthropic fate that awaits Grey is less than metaphorical.

Taken on its own fluff piece terms, Piece by Piece is an interesting sprint through three decades of cultural relevance and relatively scandal-free living. If Pharrell’s happy, then it seems we have to be too.

Wain's psychosis is shown from the inside, the Victoriana giving way to psychotronic visions that re-create Wain's futurism and dalliances with Cubism.

Singer has great inspirations, and the multilayered approach to edits and sound design within the hypnosis is ingenious and excellently executed. But it doesn't add up to much.

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.

Gloriously gonzo Appalachian creeper Spell makes one big change – having both the urban family in peril and the horrifying hicks with malicious intent be Black – and that's a refreshing change to a genre that's felt moribund since about "Wrong Turn 2."