If anything, the collaboration between González-Sola, Mumenthaler, and Sandru is a case study of how the elements of cinema fuse together to become what Roger Ebert so aptly dubbed an empathy machine.

It’s a depiction of young love, of universally recognizable awkward fumbling and fragile hopes. It might even lead a few viewers to a moment of understanding and empathy alongside their jump scares, and that seems to be Chiarella’s real intention.

As much work as the leads do to breathe life into Coley and Sonya, the story remains a bit vague. Screenwriters Kiyoko and Stefanie Scott gesture towards the girls’ backstories and motivations, but it feels like surface-level character-building instead of deeper insight.

By the film’s midway point, there’s little concrete to hold onto within the story and there’s always a risk of floating away from the onscreen action entirely.

Tanagaki enters the upper ranks of action directors with The Furious. Yet just as he’s adept at melding wildly different martial arts disciplines into one breathtaking whole, he manages to meld those mawkish aspects into the action to create a story that’s oddly wholesome.

[Spielberg] is, after all, the master of wow, and Disclosure Day is a perfect example of his ability to bypass the logic centers of the brain and go straight for the sense of wonder.

As with Carney’s other music movies, the songs aren’t special because of their catchiness but because of their meaning. While Rick hectors Danny into doing the right thing, the question becomes about what the right thing even is. Plus, as always, Carney’s ear for a genuinely good tune is peerless. Rock on.

Even at a short hour and a half runtime, the film can meander like glacier melt; a somewhat sedate pace for such an urgent topic. Intentionally or not, it gives the film the feeling not of a warning, but of a foregone conclusion: a eulogy.

Tuner may not be innovative, nor does it distract the audience with too many twiddly bits. Yet there’s a definite delight in hearing the right notes played in the right order.

The inner tension of Backrooms is between mystery and explanation. The series is often more about Async than it is about the actual rooms, allowing it to remain somewhat open-ended. But a film has to give at least some clarity, and Backrooms is torn between its own enthralling enigma and that narrative necessity.

It’s like Jillian Michaels directing an adaptation of Stephen King’s Thinner, and even some good scares can’t disguise the bitter taste it might leave in your mouth.

If we have learned anything from Coup frontman Boots Riley’s brief-but-bananapants filmography, it’s that he loves Marx, surrealism, and Oakland. As in his still-amazing debut Sorry to Bother You, he staples all three together in his second feature as writer and director, the chaotic, often very funny I Love Boosters.

A sincere and searching work – even trippy, in discrete doses – Silent Friend takes the ginkgo’s perspective. It’s in it for the long haul. The people are just passing through.

It’s an inevitable problem with the screenlife format, to find a way to keep this deluge of pop-ups and cutaways all interesting without the audience’s POV ever leaving a desktop screen.

Robin doesn’t make a definitive statement about the science of the hunt, but after the audience gets snake-struck, staring into those strange nictitating eyes, they’ll have no doubts about which species is the real mass-murdering interloper.

It’s in how Harris depicts the seemingly psychic bond between the sisters for silent conversation. In those sequences, she plays the same kind of cunning games with layout and design that she did in the published text of the script, showing a raw ingenuity that adapts the stylistic possibilities of the stage for the more realistic setting of the screen.

Like any great funfair ride designer, it’s Barker’s grasp of pacing, of when to lull and when to launch, that makes Obsession such a terrifying blast.

Even among all the fictions, audiences will find more truths about modern Russia than they’ll get from most news broadcasts.

There are moments in the bleak social commentary of The School Duel that make it clear that satire is dead. Or rather, that the extremity of what is happening in American culture is so grotesque that it’s almost impossible to push into the realm of absurdist commentary.

With very little dialogue and no cookie-cutter story beats, this fraught family life is vividly, tenderly rendered by Romvari and her naturalistic cast.

Léger and Robichaud’s update is mostly successful in filtering the intent of the original for modern sensibilities, not least in the plentiful sex scenes.

As Bauman falls deeper and deeper into the mysteries of Bilberry Inn, McCarthy masterfully reminds us that a ghost can be real and a metaphor, as the scares demand.

The tonal disconnect between the subtext and the delivery leaves this Animal Farm wobbling like the first time Napoleon tries to walk on two legs.

Mārama is arguably at its most effective as a political text when it isn’t trying so hard to be part of the heritage that includes Hitchcock’s Rebecca and del Toro’s Crimson Peak.

It’s an electrifying watch in its profound discomfort, and a testament to McKenzie’s ability to disarm with a smile, then land a righteous blow against the bad guys.

It’s an adept translation that is in turns bloody and cruel, insightful and hilarious, and, under the plentiful gore and uproarious laughter, a surprisingly touching drama. Just one with slapstick bloodbath tendencies.

Lowery may have dealt with the uncanny in A Ghost Story, but the whole point of that film was the mundanity of the afterlife. This is a truly supernatural tale, and the storytelling transitions into his version of horror, abstract and oblique.

Exuding direct-to-Redbox energy, Fuze has enough plot twists to make it watchable. You’re just not liable to remember much of it afterwards.