Richard Whittaker

True, the odd quill may scratch the surface, but there’s nothing really penetrating.

Lean as a hellhound, Shelby Oaks doesn’t rely on jump scares, although there are plenty of those. Instead, its true terror is found in writer/director Chris Stuckmann’s ability to move effortlessly from adrenaline shocks to creeping psychological strain.

Much as Blue Moon is a eulogy for the death of a creative life, it’s also a testament to Linklater’s continued vitality as a filmmaker.

Black Phone 2 may be a power ballad to the original’s minor chord metal, but it still rocks.

The script, and Byrne’s suitably breathless, solipsistic reading of it, give the audience every reason to not simply dislike Linda but despise her.

Rønning doesn’t seem confident in his storytelling acumen, relying instead on running narration provided by real-life TV anchors cold-reading the least convincing announcements this side of a Fox News host talking about Portland.

Like Johnson’s Kerr, The Smashing Machine is a surprisingly gentle giant.

Unabashedly warped and horny, Morgan knows exactly when to set off the depth charges lurking in the waters of Bone Lake, making its big, filthy reveal feel like the inevitable result of the characters’ urges.

These digressions aren’t enough to build anything like a real conversation about the Austin-made classic. There needs to be something more.

When Day-Lewis and Bean are allowed to be real brothers in arms, Anemone truly blooms.

Anderson still directs with purpose, and while One Battle After Another is never as coherent as it is exciting, it avoids the tag of being “lesser Anderson.”

Eleanor the Great never quite grapples with the ethical dilemmas that it raises, either in Eleanor’s stories, Nina’s efforts to turn them into a news project, or Roger’s usurping of their wishes for a segment on their show. But if the narrative logic falls apart, at least its emotional core remains solid, much of it bound together by Squibb’s warmth and charm.

While Figgis gets this extraordinary and unrestricted access, there’s a real question about what he does with it. Coppola is infamous for finding his films in the edit, but it’s hard to see that Figgis found that much more than he had in the camera.

The story is both simplistic and telegraphed, which is handy because some startlingly inept filmmaking makes the action almost impossible to follow. There are multiple sequences that make no sense to the eye or brain, and basic design and costume decisions that make it nearly impossible to tell characters apart from each other. The only true horror here is that there’s another couple of hours of this still to come.

It feels like Glander was hoping to create something that all the former kids that grew up on Cartoon Network’s wild, weird era will gravitate towards. But the reality is that it’s not as bizarre, creative, transgressive, or even just plain entertaining as the average episode of The Amazing World of Gumball, and that was about a 12-year-old cat boy and his fish friend.

Attempted but abandoned by filmmakers from George A. Romero to King regular Frank Darabont, six decades after completion and 40 years after publication, now it crosses the finish line as one of the best King adaptations.

Liu’s adaptation of Atticus Lish’s PEN/Faulkner Award-winning 2014 novel wends its way through the contradictions and tragedies of love between two people who need more than just a bed warmed by another body. Preparation delicately brings them together and devastatingly gives every reason for them to fall apart.

Splitsville succeeds because it never seems fragmented. As a director, Covino dances between the sensual and the silly while constantly exploring the core thesis of the messiness of relationships.

Pulsing up and down the arterial route of the B train from Brooklyn to the Bronx, Caught Stealing is a portrait of NYC at its most grimily charming.

Don't let the big (but not that big) budget fool you: It's Troma, baby, just how you like it.

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.

The greatest problem is the woeful miscasting of Qualley as Honey. The script by Coen and his wife and sometimes-film editor Tricia Cooke seems to position the gun-free P.I. as a melding of two great noir conventions – the cool gumshoe and the femme fatale – and the camera loves following Qualley in high heels and wrap dresses. Yet there’s nothing much going on beyond those visuals.

Luckily, Ne Zha II still retains the charm of the best parts of the original, with the young rapscallion Nezha still a hyperactive bundle of mischief, hand stuffed down his pants like Dennis the Menace, waddling through jade palaces as he defies his destiny. May he stay as chaotically endearing for the inevitable part III.

It’s the trippy sequences of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas without the queasy self-loathing. It’s the video to “Smack My Bitch Up” by the Prodigy, complete with POV debauchery, running on repeat 20 times. It’s … boring.

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.

Weapons is such a deliriously twisted blast that, as soon as it’s complete, you’ll want to shake up the box and do it all again.

There’s a profound mournfulness to this elegiac portrait of the end of an era, given greater poignancy by Jones’ understated performance.

This The Naked Gun never tries to lampoon or merely copy the original beloved films. Instead, director Akiva Schaffer and his co-writers, Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, get to the heart of the humor in a non-ironic, non-revisionist fashion.