Rocco T. Thompson

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.

Death of a Unicorn taps into the anti-capitalist strain in late-20th-century monster movies from Alien to Jurassic Park by tracing a clever through line from the unicorns of antiquity to the present.

We’re used to heroes who can take a licking and keep on ticking, but Novocaine takes action-movie invulnerability to brutal comic extremes.

Though Mickey 17 can feel like a mixtape of Bong’s greatest hits, it may actually be his most refined and articulate anti-capitalistic critique to date.

The mayhem that the monkey doles out makes The Monkey closer in spirit to Evil Dead than Final Destination, as the film is less a Rube Goldberg contraption of overdesigned chaos than it is a Looney Tunes-esque spectacle of quick and dirty violence that hits like a punchline.

The film is a bizarrely moving and darkly comic story about feeling like you’ve lost something you never had.

Sexy, scary, and occasionally clumsy, Carmen Emmi’s feature-length directorial debut, Plainclothes, is an anxious and unabashed gay drama about social repression and its impacts.

The film is less a character study than a numbly tragic workaday fantasia held aloft by Pamela Anderson in a performance that seems to grasp beyond the bleary-eyed edges of Gia Coppola’s screen for larger truths about the choices women make to feel seen.

Parker Finn, like his entity, is interested in getting his bony fingers into those sticky tender parts we’d rather hide away, slurping our pain like ambrosia and confronting us with the fact that more often than not, the enemy staring back is you.

Walking a dizzying line between the stupid and the profound, this exuberant, positively unique biopic is as hard to resist as it is to believe that it got made in the first place.

Ant Timpson’s heartwarming Bookworm is an effulgent love letter to ’80s kid cinema laced with a distinctly quirky, Kiwi dryness.

Primarily a vehicle for inventive and wince-inducing practical effects that best anything to be found in a 1980s-era Italian gorefest or the Saw franchise, Terrifier 3 continues the series’s trend of dotting a sparse and sinuous thread of plot with mini-masterpieces of cinematic ultraviolence.

This hollow attempt to turn a provocative showpiece into a crowd-pleaser makes you wonder if the filmmakers are actively disdainful of the original.

If there’s any food for thought in The Front Room, it’s the ongoing portrayal of old folks in the A24 catalog.

The most consistent recurring theme across the work of the Adams family—parenthood as a siphoning off of the life giver’s vitality in a protracted, eternal cycle of decay and renewal—finds its most literal, alien expression here.

Pacing is a conspicuous problem and the rushed third act threatens to crumble as The Watchers becomes overloaded with revelations and mythology that strain a foundation barely braced to hold their weight.

Challengers is an intoxicating showcase for the beauty and excitement of bodies in motion.

Frightening, even-tempered, and disarmingly humane, Civil War is intelligent precision filmmaking trained on an impossible subject.

By turns tender and raucous, Pamela Adlon’s feature-length directorial debut, Babes, spins the uneasy, unwelcome, weirdly cool corporeal realities of pregnancy into heartfelt comic gold.

The big sequence where the year 2000 hits and everything from a toaster to a Tamagotchi goes homicidal is a chaotic blast, but once the film shifts into a broader comic gear, it never quite finds its heart again.

Not quite a grim-dark reimagining of a cult favorite, this Road House is still a needlessly un-nice rework that takes the business end of a broken beer bottle to the soul of the original.

Everything Smile is doing is familiar enough at this point to be considered old-fangled, but the striking precision of its craft sloughs away any sensations of déjà vu.