Rocco T. Thompson

Hugh Jackman’s take on a fabled friend of the poor may empty his veins, but the film might have meant more had he spilled his guts.

Backrooms is undeniable, both as a future load-bearing pillar of the internet-born horror movement that’s now breaking ground and for being built on a concept that feels truly new.

Damian McCarthy threads the needle between supplying old-school scares and a richly layered character piece that also functions as a meditation on his own perspective as a storyteller.

The film is a boldly theatrical pop exorcism where the wounds of the past serve as a gateway to forces that can consume or lift the possessed to ecstatic new levels of self-expression.

Kristoffer Borgli delights in creating a hypothetical trap for his lovers, but he also acknowledges that there’s something romantic about being stuck in it together.

Like a particularly impressive aspic, Wuthering Heights is tantalizing to behold but not so easy to swallow.

The Bone Temple doesn’t pack the moment-to-moment kineticism of the prior films.

If only the filmmakers had put the same care and thought into their human characters, then Primate might have been worth going apeshit over.

The Plague is vividly, terrifying attuned to the way children create a social order that resists sensible adult intrusion and influence.

The film’s brand of feminism is as skin-deep as the narrative.

Just as Stanley Kramer’s Judgement at Nuremberg explored the Nuremberg trials against the backdrop of the emerging Cold War, James Vanderbilt’s film holds the trials up as a mirror to our current era of authoritarianism.

Chris Stuckmann’s utilitarian approach is doubly frustrating considering that Shelby Oaks does, at least in the early going, point toward potentially having something to say about the vlogger space, internet infamy, and the way tragedy takes on a cultural virality.

Much of Road to Revenge plays like a spectacularly gory silent film, with Aatami taking out scores of Red Army soldiers in action scenes that are as inventive as they are incredibly funny.

The film unearths new depths of existential anxiety engendered by the increasingly tumultuous 2020s.

Throughout, Scott Derrickson collapses dreams, reality, past, and present sidelong into a singular cinematic haunted space.

The story’s boilerplate setup gets a noticeable lift thanks to Darren Aronofsky’s style and focus.

That Together treats its body horror as just another wrinkle in the complexities of what it means to love someone else is writer-director Michael Shanks’s smartest move.

After its opening act, the film gets silly fast, with a frankly stupid witchcraft subplot and narrative turns that are telegraphed with audience-insulting obviousness.

Late in this reboot, a character states “Nostalgia is overrated,” and it feels like an indictment of the film we’ve been watching. Far from making a case for the original I Know What You Did Last Summer as one with its own identity and a legacy worth turning over, Robinson’s update is so cynically made and self-indulgent that it will at least leave you respecting the workmanlike scare-making that director Jim Gillespie brought to the 1997 film.

Eddington is especially pointed in the way that it views our online connectedness as a social cancer rather than an engine for progress.

The film’s conception of the future, perceptively, looks back to humankind’s primeval past.

Christian Swegal’s feature-length directorial debut is like staring into a national wound.

Set to the rhythms of a pulsing, ultramodern New York milieu, the film, at its best, wrings real tension and excitement out of the simple exchanging of clandestine messages and sensitive information.

The film has a white-hot nerve of pain running inside it that burns right through the screen.

It’s difficult to shake that there’s something tragic blaring from the sidelines that the film’s wistful, pitch-perfect Hollywood ending can’t acknowledge.

This is a formidable technical showcase and obsessive forensic recreation whose imposed formal limitations become meaning-making ends in and of themselves.

The discomfort in watching Holland is not knowing if something is intended or, like the main character, you’re looking for things that aren’t there.

The film knows that when the stakes are sky high, the emotions need to be firmly grounded.