If The Lodge had focused as much on its three leads as it did on building a creepy atmosphere to put them in, it may have been as terrorizing an experience as it aspired to be.

Outside of watching modern Trump characteristics being absorbed from the worst influences around him, it rarely has the insight you’d hope for from a biopic centered on one of the defining political figures of the 21st century.

Greyhound has occasional bursts of violent excitement but it's overall lack of engaging characters, the unappetizing CG, and the lackluster story make for a very color-by-numbers outing from a headlining star capable of a whole lot more.

The Bad Guys is a fun, family-friendly caper that’s bursting with action and brimming with laughs.

Synchronic isn't a home run, but a decent time travel triple is always welcome.

While it may be light on logic and effects, it’s still a lovely story about being yourself, no matter what anyone thinks.

Anna and the Apocalypse is a delightful Christmas/horror/comedy/musical hybrid, with a great cast, entertaining gore and a storyline that’s easy to take seriously… even though it’s fundamentally absurd.

Godzilla and Rogue One director Gareth Edwards returns with an original (albeit derivative) science fiction vision: the story of a future war between man and machine, as told through the bond that develops between, well, a man and a child-sized machine. As pure spectacle, The Creator is often jaw-dropping in its imagery, its relatively frugal special effects, and the detailed depth of its futuristic design. It's shakier as drama and sci-fi – and in its sentimental depiction of synthetic humans just trying to live their synthetic lives, a bit out of step with the anxieties of our increasingly AI-dominated age.

Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner are wonderful together. They look great when they're in bed together and they look even better when they're fighting. Throw Danny DeVito into the mix and you've got a very enjoyable, watchable trio of heroes.

Its efforts at social commentary mostly fall flat, but its thrilling moments and Gyllenhaal’s intense performance largely make up for that.

Director Lee Haven Jones elevates this ripe premise with a masterful use of color and a garnish of gore. This makes for a feast of the eyes, bursting with visuals gorgeous and gruesome. Tied together with a surreal tone and topped off with a generous sprinkling of carnage, The Feast serves up a heady and haunting experience that sticks to your ribs and rattles your nerves.

Hold the Dark is a beautiful-looking bore.

While its flaws are rooted in what it avoids, its marriage of topic and form yields a blast of positivity in a way that perfectly suits its withholding subject, granting his interviews the kind of depth and creativity embodied by his music. While it avoids all thorny entanglements, it looks good and feels great, like any LEGO movie should.

With heavy inspirations from games like Dead Space and movies like Alien and The Thing, Flying Lotus' Ash is an ambitious, visually enthralling sci-fi horror movie. But its tale of a space station terrorized by a mysterious, gooey threat is otherwise empty and derivative, and takes too long to get going.

The Covenant isn’t Guy Ritchie’s best, but standout performances from Jake Gyllenhaal and Dar Salim as bonded heroes save an otherwise bloated military thriller.

Downton Abbey: A New Era starts out as a wistful return to the familiar before shedding its skin and letting the series’ nauseating ugliness come frothing to the surface. It goes from funny and charming to jaw-droppingly grim at the drop of a hat — a wild tonal whiplash that’s absolutely worth a watch. It’s a concentrated dose of Downton Abbey.

Atomic Blonde is one of the best action films of the year.

Ultimately, Lupin III: The First plays it safe. While the film adds a new visual kick, there’s not a whole lot in the way of storytelling innovation. But maybe we don’t need it.

There's nothing uniquely surprising or exceptionally rousing, which is a shame given the unfathomably dreadful predicament and an interesting turn of a performance from Dave Bautista. It's a film without sensation that feels like it's pulling its punches across the board – development is stunted, ideas lack passion, and the camera avoids visible violence – before the ending strolls off into the sunset with barely any goodbye.

All five stories in V/H/S/94 feature a cult-like element, but only one of them feels like a true work of madness.

Unsane is a creepy little thriller, with a concept that could terrify just about anybody, and a plot that wobbles but ultimately stays on the rails. Claire Foy gives a standout performance and Steven Soderbergh’s intimate visual style sells the idea that we are watching something horribly sinister get revealed.

Love is put to the test in Greek director Christos Nikou’s Fingernails, a sleek sci-fi film about a near-future where couples can scientifically test their love by removing one of the titular body parts.

3 Days of the Condor is a classic spy thriller. It remains just as relevant and thrilling today as it did in 1975. It's a film built around political metaphors and pessimism, trends that continue to spiral and evolve throughout our culture even today, with events unfolding that oddly mimic this film's once outlandish plot.

Stowaway is shrewd in its decision-making and even better in its execution.

Triangle of Sadness pokes fun at the ultra-rich, playing their undoing for laughs in the worst of situations. It’s a masterclass in cringe comedy with Harris Dickinson playing it straight throughout as he finds himself in appallingly toe-curling situations.

Alpha (think Bear Grylls’ meets The Incredible Journey: Ice Age Edition) is a welcome end of summer surprise that will tug at the heartstrings and delivers a visual spectacle that will wow. It’s just a shame that it tips more towards spectacle over substance.

Though mostly played straight, Faces of Death has a wicked sense of humor that’s used in a commendable manner. It’s not overplayed, but always lurking under the surface, and it provides some of that aforementioned twisted fun.

It has a wacky premise involving a woman swapping places with a chair, but the uncompromising consumerist satire By Design is more performance art than camp classic.

The Rip may stumble at times due to an uneven script and forgettable action scenes, but its interesting premise, talented cast – lead by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck – and twist ending make for a mostly enjoyable experience.

In the Earth is an oppressive, bizarre trip of sight, sound, and spore-induced psychedelia. Director Ben Wheatley sometimes sacrifices characterization for the loftier ideas about nature he wants to explore but given how innately the audience should understand how one would be affected by a pandemic, it’s a gambit that mostly pays off as the film’s third act roars toward an all-out sensory assault in the climax.

It’s the kind of movie worth recommending for its ambition alone, merely to witness the audacious result of anxious self-loathing writ large across the silver screen, without an ounce of restraint. That it’s also a remarkably well-crafted horror-comedy is a cherry on top.

Kenneth Branagh’s third Poirot film is his best and strangest yet.

The Matrix Resurrections is a bunch of really good ideas stacked together to make a bad — and sometimes ugly — film.

Glitch: The Rise and Fall of HQ Trivia is a fascinating look at the compressed life and death of the HQ Trivia app. It’s a familiar tale of tech failure, but the details – and the massive popularity of the app – make it an interesting one to watch.

Eli Roth finally adapts his fake trailer into a real slasher movie – and it’s not without its nasty charms

The Devil Wear Prada 2 plays the hits. It’s a glossy, charming, and razor-sharp follow-up to the beloved 2006 original.

Solo may not really develop its title character or justify why it needed to exist, but it still delivers a fun time.

The combination of gore and complex characterization can be uneven from scene to scene, but the filmmakers’ unique qualities and perspectives give it more personality than your average low-budget creature feature.

Totally Killer may not reinvent the wheel, but its blend of Scream meets Disney Channel Original movie gets the job done quite admirably. The cast and the story’s heart makes up for any technical missteps, and while it definitely falls into the usual time travel traps, it makes fun of itself while doing so!

Writer-director Riley Stearns transforms depression and disappointment into a hilarious confrontation of death and a peculiar tale of self-image in an uncanny film with a precisely bizarre lead performance.

In the end, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie is one of the best zombie films that no one's ever seen. It owes a great deal to Romero's Night of the Living Dead, yet it also manages to stand quite nicely on its own merits. While the film does have a few script and pacing problems, it more than makes up for them with it's excellent atmosphere and solid gore work.

A low-energy comedy remade from a French farce, The Valet tries (and fails) to inject an absurd story of stardom and fake romance with added commentary and sentiment. Eugenio Derbez and Samara Weaving lead a more than capable cast, but they can’t overcome the film’s sluggish length and disconnected story.

Set It Up is as formulaic as they come. That fact alone isn’t enough to avoid it on Netflix though. Most fans of this genre know what they are getting into, easily enjoying the charming displays of friendship, the few silly moments, and predictable ending.

It may not be a great movie, but Timotheé Chalamet delivers a performance so vibrant that it almost rubs off on everything else, and he’s matched in every scene by Steve Carell, Maura Tierney and Amy Ryan.

Tim Burton allows the cast of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice to have fun, even if they're all off in separate movies that barely overlap. Its story is intentionally robbed of dramatic weight, but this makes way for the goofy, imaginative practical effects of Burton's early days, resulting in a small-scale legacy sequel that doesn't take itself too seriously (because it doesn’t need to).

Bob Odenkirk’s presence helps create a sense of gravitas even when the film is straightforward, adding soulful dimensions to a fairly simple character in whose hands guns and explosives are as much tools of violence as they are instruments of a righteousness long lost to moral compromise.

It may be slow to begin with, but it all results in an unexpected finale that is sure to shock and stay with you long after the movie has ended.

You may find yourself passing a very enjoyable couple of hours with the oddest of odd couples. 

Terrifier 3 is a bounty of practical effects riches that cannot be denied, but its storytelling is scattershot in ways that hold the sequel back.

While not necessarily the very best of this genre, it’s a solid character drama benefiting from strong performances by a top-drawer cast.

It’s an odd “rock and a hard place” production about survival of the fittest mentalities that can’t help but indulge soapy relationship dramatics amidst an otherwise dire entrapment, which will probably leave most laughing and irritated at the wrong times.

Overall, Creeps is witty, it's scary, it's gory, and it includes a number of one-liners that many film-fans still quote today, though none will ever be as memorable as: "The good news is…your dates are here. The bad news is…they're dead."

Free Guy delivers a first hour that is outrageously entertaining, stuffed with gonzo action, goofy gags, star power, big ideas, and plenty of Easter Eggs for lovers of movies and video games. However, in its second half, the joyful journey is derailed by a slog of a side quest, falling short of the potential set-up.

While Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Once and Always has a deeply emotional story at its center and plenty of fun nostalgic moments to enjoy during its one-hour runtime, it’s hard to shake the feeling that this special needed better effects and dialogue to make it truly Morphenomenal.

Its few hints of flair may not cement it as a genre classic, but they’re enough to make it momentarily fun.

Annabelle: Creation is the rare horror sequel that improves upon the original, featuring more engaging protagonists and a far less problematic ending.

The King is a relevant reshaping of Shakespeare's Henry V featuring a stunning turn by Timothée Chalamet.

A Glitch In The Matrix is a solid sibling to Room 237 and The Nightmare. Once more, Ascher offers an empathetic space to conspiracy theorists and dreamers, creating a superb setting for honesty, earnestness, and vulnerability. Employing keen editing, he illustrates their arguments with pop culture references and panache. However, he also offers the shadow of a doubt, allowing the viewer a safe space to question.

Sick is exceptionally paced and provides slasher thrills with breakneck intensity, but loses traction during a wobbly landing that needlessly overcomplicates an otherwise cutthroat thrill ride.

Abigail is a hilariously gory romp that banks on a memorable ensemble cast and a witty screenplay that invigorates vampire tropes with a refreshing drollness.

Grafted makes a patchwork of its ideas but manages to be an entertaining, mindful, gore-saturated charge through social hell.

The Rental boats a strong cast, an intriguing set up, and a compelling mystery. It's a fun and feisty web of lies and deception with the added bonus of having a shadowy, stalking presence surrounding everything and everyone like a God-hand. It's a small film, but it's tense, dense, and delivers a harrowing final act.

While it sometimes leans too heavily on its ickier aspects, Cuckoo has just enough sense of its own absurdity to remain disgustingly fun.

The Monkey is one of the best horror-comedies (and Stephen King adaptations) in recent memory, exploding off the screen with both gory kills and big laughs.

With Apostle, Gareth Evans has proven he can not only master action films with stunning choreography, but he can also deliver a bone-chilling folk horror tale rich in mythology and shocking in violence. Apostle owes a lot to classic folk horror films, but Evans manages to make his film feel fresh and gripping enough to satisfy even the most blood-thirsty horror fan.

The live-action How to Train Your Dragon can feel hemmed in by its faithfulness to the animated original, but it’s re-creating that film’s sense of heart and soul as well as its entire plot and most enduring images.

Copshop is meaningfully and enjoyably derivative as a patchwork homage to '70s shoot-em-up cinema (even Spaghetti Westerns), but it never quite reaches its potential.

First Blood is not the Rambo movie we initially think of when the character is mentioned. No, it’s much better than that.

Good Fortune is a witty, warm, celestial comedy of errors that splendidly blends the wry world of the Frat Pack with the dopiness of Bill & Ted. It's got great performances -- including a devilishly angelic one from Keanu Reeves -- and offers a fresh, funny look at modern hardships.

Directed by Barry Levinson (this was his sophomore theatrical feature following Diner), the film is quite moving. Redford delivers a great, soft-spoken, naturalistic performance and he's paired with a solid all-star cast. Randy Newman's score is absolutely terrific, too. One of the best he's ever done.

Great stuff, if you can stomach the dated look and content.

While Vanishing Point isn't the ultimate car chase movie as Tarantino would make you believe, it's certainly layered with fascinating subtext and few decent chase elements to keep action fans at bay.

A movie that takes a while to get going, but once everything starts to come together you end up having a good time. If you're into detective films or are just looking for something atmospheric, then Hammett is a safe bet for a quiet night of mystery and intrigue.

Kate Hudson and Hugh Jackman’s performances are a treat in Song Sung Blue. They sing and perform their hearts out, but none of it ends up in service to a coherent vision, let alone one that says something meaningful or profound.

Avatar: Fire and Ash isn’t the technical leap forward that its predecessor was, which is to be expected after three years instead of thirteen. But what it lacks in novelty, it more than makes up for with refinement on every level.

Triple Frontier features a cool cast and a gruesome story about greed, but it fails to capitalize on its own premise.

From the sincerity of the lead performances to the cartoonish gore offered by Werewolves Within director Josh Rubenn. There are much worse ways to spend Valentine’s Day than a genre cocktail for saps and gorehounds alike.

The Return of The Pink Panther is so devoid of life that NASA wouldn't bother to send probes to investigate it.

It's a heartbreaking tragedy, dreamer's comedy, and saucy stumble through double-edged "success" stories, but most of all? It's a bloated, brass-band-swingin' mess.

Though Skincare’s script lacks bite or balance, Elizabeth Banks gives a riveting lead performance with assistance from Lewis Pullman as her sketchy sidekick.

The cast (including Brooks, Anne Brancroft, Christopher Lloyd, Tim Matheson and Oscar-nominee Charles Durning) does their best to keep the laughs flowing.

Peter Pan & Wendy is a beautiful take on the classic children's story, retold for all of us who chose to grow up and continue to struggle with our decision.

Crowe is magnificent as Hando, the leader of the gang whose decisions land them all in hot water and Daniel Pollock (who killed himself during post production) is right there with him. It's a tragic, harrowing little film.

Rise of the Teenage Mutant Turtles: The Movie soundly trumps other Turtles reboots in the humor and heart departments, although its simple plot keeps it just short of amazing.

Real-life tragic romance Spoiler Alert is kneecapped by the plainness of its storytelling, and only marginally saved by its performances.

A young Jennifer Jason Leigh is exceptional, and Judge Reinhold provides a solid central character that nearly everyone in the film relates to.

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba - To the Hashira Training is a visual delight which will please the series’ biggest fans.

While Fear Street Part 2: 1978 still offers some thrills, it's not a cut above its predecessor.

Black Phone 2 is a template for how sequels can reach further and push for standalone appeal, bringing us as close to Freddy Krueger as we'll get until there's another A Nightmare on Elm Street.

The Wretched's endeavor to meld a junior mystery with some pretty extreme horror works more than it doesn't, but ultimately neither side of this narrative coin gets explored as much as it should. Despite this, as a well shot and admirably executed thriller, it's a good entry into the catalogue of on-the-cheap scares.

Vice is a funny and vicious political commentary, revealing in clear, thrilling detail a man whom filmmaker Adam McKay considers one of the most insidious and dangerous political figures of the last fifty years. But that viciousness also makes Vice one-sided, even reductive.

Ocean’s 8 is the most satisfying installment in the franchise. The all-star cast is impeccable, the shift in focus yields sharp insights, and the heist itself is wily and enjoyable. What the film lacks in suspense it makes up for in style, and that style has undeniable substance.

Director Liesl Tommy and co-writer Tracy Scott Wilson provide a shocking backdrop for Franklin’s life, and Hudson balances all this with a skill that’s worthy of a second Oscar nomination. It feels more like a Broadway-ready musical than a biopic, but that doesn’t take away from the impact of the performances.

All told, it's a terrifically entertaining tale filled with humor, heart, and allusions that are sure to delight fantasy fans.

Abominable is a simple, sweet, slight story that’s been told before, and told better.

Riz Ahmed makes for a vigorous lead in Aneil Karia’s contemporary British-Indian Hamlet, which loses its emotional clarity beneath an intriguing exterior. Its use of silence and intimacy grants it a fascinating texture, but the film never challenges or re-invigorates Shakespeare’s greatest work, ensuring that it ends up somewhere in the middle of a lengthy pile of adaptations.

The Front Runner is too afraid to take a side in its central debate, but a strong ensemble cast and interesting ideas about accountability and newsworthiness make this a timely and thought-provoking film.

Nuremberg doesn’t quite stand up with the best films centered on World War II, but it does a respectable job dramatizing the aftermath of the conflict. The film is anchored by a strong cast, led by another great turn by Russell Crowe, and a consistent thematic throughline, but the first act’s use of ill-timed humor doesn’t do the film any favors.