Richard Whittaker

Knapp's script is ultimately about how we are trapped in our own pasts, and even when they can seem like a pillow they can become an anchor. It's a soft, sad, yet insistent message that, even as the grass overtakes the baseball pitch where Adam practices, and even as the last windmills slow their spin, becomes a quiet voice of hope.

The Strangler has been called a slasher, but it is not. It has been called a giallo, an anti-giallo, and even a revisionist giallo. But it is none of those things. Paul Vecchiali's newly restored 1970 crime flick is, instead, a meditation that crawled onto the Left Bank of post-war French philosophical ruminations.

A loving, gory, ribald slasher flick that is both serious about the genre and gruesomely ridiculous.

At its best, there's an undoubted thrill and wonder to Pom Poko, like the massive parade of phantoms the tanuki conjure up as one of their harebrained schemes. Takahata's misfire at least provides some wonderful sparkles.

As a simple story of a moralizer being brought down by their own bloody instincts, it works; but asides about the catharsis of gore, and the inner evil of humanity not needing horror movies to be seeded, imply the script wanted something deeper.

What Taylor illustrates in this version of Little Red Riding Hood is a sensitive portrait of guilt, of the difference between people who simply want to bury it and those that are consumed by it.

Both Koepp and Soderbergh are to blame for the underdelivery of a pivotal, plot-defining, single line of dialogue that should have been a strand woven throughout the film.

What makes Orphan: First Kill worthwhile is that it acknowledges the original before taking a hard left turn into overblown soapy madness. The modern gothic of the first film transforms here into a perfectly fitting explosion of operatic schlock.

There's an extraordinary immediacy to Luxor, born of director Durra's unromantic but loving view of the environment.

When the segments do gel, they share a wickedly witty and suitably sickly, gory sense of humor that relishes insider horror jokes but never feels cliquey.

Sam & Kate doesn't try to elicit big emotional responses, but that's exactly why it gets them.

When it comes to the segments, Scare Package II is much more successful than the first film in striking a unified tone – maybe less outrageously funny, maybe a little drier, but still entertaining.

If you're not au fait with the scandalous yet prim world of the 1950s West End, See How They Run is still a silly if slight affair, playful without ever being weighty, and mostly given a sense of giddiness by Rockwell's gruff detective and Ronan as his determined if doubting assistant.

Even if it beat Videodrome to the screen by two years, it's not quite the same level of must-see programming. It's fascinating, but less coherent, less scathing, and far more meandering.

So often, romance subplots in Texas noir feel like afterthoughts, there to increase a little bit of tension. But South of Heaven’s most meaningful moments are in the interplay between Lilly and Sudeikis as the star-crossed lovers with time most definitely not on their side.

Social anxiety abounds in velvet-black British college reunion comedy All My Friends Hate Me, a seething sneer of a satire that swirls around angst-plagued Pete (Stourton), the milquetoast member of a group of friends who come together to celebrate his birthday.

Yes, The Old Way is at first glimpse merely a classic revenger, but it's also vintage low-key Cage, with that acid little twist that makes it all the more fascinating.

Brutally honest, startlingly insightful, and poignant when it could have been bizarre, Dead Dicks earns its tragic, purposefully misleading title and reframes it with dire meaning.

Uncle Frank revolves around Uncle Frank, and Bettany's career-great performance as a man who knows where the gaps are in his life, and how much his whole relationship with his family is about holding his breath.

There’s a ridiculous level of glee to how the Indonesian filmmaker orchestrates a good old-fashioned headshot, or a kick that sends a knee buckling the right way.

Anyone just expecting a cutesy animal romp may be sorely disappointed, but that’s because this isn’t about the quietly expansive inner life of Juan Salvador.

Brimming with cornball humor and overt sentimentality, there’s something compelling within the film’s unyielding commitment to its own idiosyncrasies, not to mention the emotionally cogent backbone.

For those of you who had your brain bent in real time by the ultimate superstar outsider of Eighties comedy, there’s still enough new here to make retreading his familiar career worthwhile.

What makes Fully Realized Humans all the funnier is the couple's conviction that they're always doing the right thing: and, again, if it wasn't for the wide-eyed smart-naïve performances from Wexler and Leonard the whole thing would be insufferable.

Fascinating as the The Infiltrators is, it remains a beginner’s primer to the for-profit immigration system with an oddly jaunty narrative over the top. Like the NIYA activists, its heart may be bigger than its head sometimes, but that’s not the world’s biggest sin.

McAulay has crafted a terse, bleak drama. It's reminiscent of the portrait of a corrupt male friendship in Super Dark Times, but with the added pressures of kinship and family. To describe Don't Tell a Soul as a story of toxic masculinity is both accurate but, in a time when every film with a flawed or unpleasant male an/protagonist gets that tag, almost glib. There's something rancid between the boys.

After the gimmicky Saw 3D: The Final Chapter, the clunky semi-reboot of Jigsaw, and the misguided Spiral: From the Book of Saw, Saw X feels like a welcome return to form.

The aliens look better than ever, Morgan delivers just the right kind of dry-witted action heroics, and Skylines takes the trip to the stars that the franchise has been promising.