Take out the masked menace, this is still tense: Add them in, and it's stomach-churning. Brutal, smart, wild and mean, The Rental savagely reinvents the summer camp slasher for the vacation rental generation, and delivers a punchline payoff that will leave you reeling.

Nearly three hours in length, the movie becomes an endurance test with each heartless act, relentless in its depiction of a Hobbesian state of humankind, in which life has little innate value.

Bosco and Coffman make a convincing argument that only Mary Flannery O'Connor could become Flannery O'Connor. Some of her works would probably be unpublishable now, but she isn't writing them now. If she'd survived past 39, maybe the next book after The Violent Bear It Away would have been very different. But, they posit, the Flannery O'Connor we have is the Flannery O'Connor we got, and maybe the one we deserved.

As COVID-19 widens the gap between the rich and the poor in communities across the country, Cut Throat City’s institutional assault feels sadly timely.

Rich with technical strategies that enhance our view into Femi’s emotions, The Last Tree uses slow-motion, diffused sound, and many Spike Lee-like camera shots to make the story extremely personal and unique.

Nagahisa's script dares to embrace true nihilism: not selfishness, not posturing decadence, but the genuine commitment to your core that the meaningless of the world isn't a bug, it's a feature. These zombies may be dancing in the trash, but at least they're dancing.

The plot isn’t sturdy enough to fill two hours. An honorable mention, but no best in show.

It upholds deep respect for everything that makes a rom-com great: unabashed joy.

It's hard to say exactly where all the blame lies, but there's something surprisingly ugly at play in the depiction of middle-aged women as "past it and crazy." That may not be the intention of Chong, Essoe, and director Gayne, but that's where this ends up.

The fact that Emily aspires to be an astrobiologist, fascinated by the study of extremophile life forms, is foreshadowing that could seem clumsy in a less crushingly doom-laden and exquisitely eerie story.

The comparisons to "Hereditary," Ari Aster's febrile masterpiece of familial dysfunction, are inevitable, and while James doesn't quite reach that film's perturbing depths she brings a different insight.

This is also one of the few recent horror American horror film that makes smart use of an urban setting, and throws in a few true-crime references to boot.

Odom Jr. won the Tony for his performance here, a fact that’s been somewhat dwarfed over the years by Miranda’s tsunamic success, but the neat trick of this filmed version is to time-machine viewers back to an extraordinary moment in American cultural history – to put us, to borrow from Miranda, in the room where it happened. It feels like such a gift.

Sporadically, the deliberately organic, semi-improvised tone doesn't quite gel, and there are momentary longueurs that could derail the story. But Myrick's decision to keep the narrative simple, and instead concentrate on the characters, means there's always a thick strand of sympathy and tragedy at play.

While the performances are total delights, there remains the nagging feeling that Kore-eda is not working at his peak.

Director Porter has done an excellent job assembling archival footage and interviews to tell Lewis’ story; she has the markings of a great storyteller.

First-time feature director Kim pulls every moment back its most quiet and intimate, instead letting the ambiguity of personal moments play out. Most importantly, she keeps newcomer Park's performance as Eun-hee in constant focus at a time when she barely knows herself, and definitely doesn't understand other people.

This film, the inspiration for the less successful Sorcerer, is a textbook case of how to handle suspense. It has also been called the cruelest movie ever made and it certainly earns that title by the film's end.

It's not just that this is poorly timed: there would never be any good time for this level of monstrous clumsiness and obviousness.

From the most generous angle, All I Can Say functions as a found footage précis of the perils of fast fame, illustrating Hoon’s deepening addictions as the band’s profile rises.

Just One of Those Things checks off all the stream-age doc boxes: unheard audio, unseen home movies, color from family, collaborator-peers, and celebs.

Honestly, it's refreshing to have a movie built around dance and dancers that emphasizes both art and character, especially after the tedious schlock of Gaspar Noé's severely anticlimactic "Climax."

While the film may lack the conventional sociopolitical framework needed to locate it in the broader Australian experience, Newell and her subjects are a constant source of empathy and education.

Beats catches the misery and desperation that powered rave culture and the era of DayGlo shell suits. The disappointment is that the Welsh strips all the color out of Hurley's vibrant play, which he originally staged with a live DJ accompaniment.

You can take Yourself and Yours at face value, and watch it like Min-jung is a pathological liar, or you can watch it trusting her every time she claims she’s not Min-jung, and see it as a metaphor for how men see women. That there are numerous ways to view her and the story makes it one of Hong’s most powerful and engrossing films.

If Koepp as a writer had leaned into those elements he sets up early, then maybe Koepp as a director could have done more with them.

In her remarkable, warm, and sometimes delicately sad debut feature, writer/director Channing Godfrey Peoples sees both sides of this intergenerational struggle. What's truly special is that she avoids any histrionics. Ever since James Dean screamed "You're tearing me apart," filmmakers have craved that emotional explosion, but Peoples paints life in this Black working class Fort Worth neighborhood in softer tones.

Riddlehoover's greatest insight is in letting the daughters tell the story.