Richard Whittaker

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

Mutiny in Heaven would make a fitting pairing with White's 2012 TV documentary, Junkie Monastery, another tale of hedonism and cerebral discourse clashing.

The animated feature directorial debut of both Kim Burdon and Robert Chandler (writer/producer of The Amazing Maurice) is a light jaunt that's mostly delivered in mid-tier CG and mildly overblown celebrity voice-acting. However, there are still some delightful flourishes, like opening credits that evoke the distinctive vintage British Rail tourism posters, and a flashback involving articulated paper puppets.

After the facile mysticism of Silence, the tone-deaf anti-union cant of The Irishman and the self-indulgent cutesiness of Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story By Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon feels like the work of a filmmaker who is doing more than just ticking off boxes on a decades-old wish list.

It's less an examination of the psyche of one man than a PSA about manipulators. As a judge is quoted as saying: If you see Michael Organ coming, run.

This first film is a delight, a giddy old-school serial adventure romp that will introduce kids to the wonders of vintage cinematic detectives.

Demián Rugna's debut feature, Terrified contains one of the most eerily disturbing scenes in recent cinema history, a moment involving an unwanted guest at a dinner table. His follow-up, When Evil Lurks, confirms that the Argentinian filmmaker knows exactly how to get under your skin.

Unfortunately, The Royal Hotel ultimately lacks the subtle ambiguity about complicity and power that made The Assistant so fascinating. Instead, it's a feel-good ending that borders on trite, and even oddly carries a whiff of cultural imperialism.

Theologically muddled, narratively simplistic, and somehow pulling off a bigger waste of a legacy character than the near-blasphemous return of Sally Hardesty for 2022's ill-fated Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Exorcist: Believer proves that double the possessions does not mean double the fun.

Elcar's setup may be minimalist, but Brightwood turns that simple idea into a well-crafted baroque puzzle box.

The resolution is purposefully yet powerfully enigmatic, in a fashion that transcends both the police procedural of the opening acts and the details of Tunisian political history.

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.

Bawdy, insightful, and full of heart, The Re-Education of Molly Singer gets a gold star on its report card.

Director Rebekah McKendry follows up her deliciously disgusting Lovecraftian rest stop comedy Glorious with a feature that doesn't have quite the same twisted ingenuity. Instead, she focuses on good, old-fashioned scares.

Operatic, overblown, and yet still touching, Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time may be a mouthful, but it's also full of heart.

There's an undeniable boldness to Capobianco's decision to channel a biography through the medium of stop motion, but it's perfect for the untrammeled exuberance and boundless ingenuity of Da Vinci.

In three segments Satanic Hispanics has zipped between high Gothic, hijinks, and activist metaphor. They're all entertaining, but every time the action cuts back to the diffident Traveler – who keeps threatening dire consequences if he's not immediately released – you'll wonder why he doesn't tell pithier, more connected stories.

Where so many queer creature features attempt to refract and reframe fairy tale tropes, Jae Matthews' script for My Animal is intriguing because there's always the threat of the real world at the edges.

It's an incisive, intriguing, and ultimately moving look at America's ongoing socioeconomic collapse: The whole "kids streaming their first slow dance" thing is just one aspect of this rich and nuanced drama.

As much as Øvredal tries to evade all the modern blockbuster conventions that are bound to keep the Demeter from its best destination, it’s too bumpy a journey to ever feel quite on course.

Unfortunately, most of the budget seems to have been spent on the first half, a murky slog through the depths of the meg-infested abyssal depths of the titular Trench where the characters are puddle-deep and the villains so cardboard that their biggest danger isn't being chum but dissolving in water.

Smith presents the danger as the cumulative effect of being trans and Black and a sex worker in America. However, that's not all that Smith is talking about.

This isn't a definitive history of the Athens indie scene (as indicated by the way that REM and Pylon are only mentioned, not heard), but an overview of the people who created and became associated with the distinctive Elephant 6 logo.

Co-produced and edited by Austin filmmaker Karen Skloss, Have You Got It Yet? is as exhaustive a study of Barrett as possible. It does suffer from the flaw that affects so many biographical documentaries, that the subject is somehow unique.

It's mean, gritty, and brutally nihilist, its mystery unwrapping before it strangles you with its perfect meanness. If noir is about, as the old saying goes, bad people doing bad things for good reasons, then Sympathy for the Devil bleeds in all the right ways.

Indeed, much like the Academy that created an animated features Oscar just to keep cartoons away from "real movies," Paint Vs Pixels often falls into the trap of believing that animation should be kid-friendly. Yet it still provides an incredible viewpoint from the artist's side of the wonder of American animation and its rich legacy.

The experience is a little like being stuck in a Doom Buggy on a day when the ride is very stop-start. The flow of the attraction collapses, becoming individual cool designs but not a story.