Rocco T. Thompson

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.