Daddy’s Head offers enough bone-chilling imagery — often delivered via razor-sharp jump scares — to make Shudder’s latest headscratcher worth a watch and a think.

Blitz creates a rousing show of strength in the face of horrific civil strife, and there’s an undeniable power to how McQueen revisits the most visible chapter of his country’s history through the eyes of someone who’s so frequently been erased from its pages. If some of the movie is hurt by its failure to bear his imprint, that only serves to remind us just how valuable his imprint has become.

While Grant’s film nails certain elements necessary to the genre (like casting a pair of likable, capable stars who generate some real heat), the film is also prone to falling into just as many bad habits and limp tropes synonymous with big screen romance.

“You’re Next” doesn’t work particularly well as a stand-alone film, but that’s ok because it nails so much of what fans might be hoping for and expect from a new feature length take on the story.

More than anything, Blink succeeds as a film about the lengths that parents will go to give their children every possible ounce of joy in an indifferent world that too often has cruel other plans for them.

With elegant acting from its two young leads and picturesque cinematography from Matthias Koenigswieser, it serves as a competently executed morality play for audiences craving a bit of unambiguous humanism.

The filmmakers’ decisive presentation is enjoyable enough as an entrée served straight to streaming.

There’s good fun to be had in watching so many limbs get hacked off for the better part of two hours, but Director Kim can only dismember so many body parts before he starts to lose track of his movie’s spine.

This lilting tale’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it brevity proves inseparable from the lasting power of its punch-to-the-gut impact.

If The Platform 2 iterates on the original idea in a way that proves this property’s franchise potential, it falls apart in almost the exact same way as the previous film, abandoning the broadly representational nature of its premise in favor of the maddeningly specific mythology of its silly non-characters.

At its heart, Dead Talents Society is an affectionate ode to East Asian horror cinema, and its earnestness — and silliness — are key to its appeal.

Notice to Quit is redeemed by the simple fact of its nature: This isn’t a film that lives in the lows and highs of its defining moments so much as it’s a film that’s sustained by the strength it takes to put one foot in front of the other, and by the rush of rushing through New York City in lockstep with someone you care about.

Terrifier 3 is decking the halls with a triumphant celebration that’s horrifying for all the right reasons and snaps into focus what it is that Leone does singularly well. That may or may not win people over, but it shouldn’t lose any repeat customers.

A movie brimming with sentiment but not sentimentality, this is one of the most moving animated films in recent memory, and, beyond that, groundbreaking too.

Yes, life can only be understood backwards, but Memoir of a Snail makes a sweetly compelling case that we’ll see the beauty in it one day — such a sweetly compelling case, in fact, that you might just start looking for it now

Daaaaaali! sure seems like the one movie that Dupieux was destined to make.

In aiming for a piece of atmospheric sensuality, she instead lands in an erotic no man’s land, where the dramatic but obvious filmmaking — like an orbital shot when Emmanuelle finally reaches orgasm — isn’t surprising or evocative enough to make up for the silly monologues and empty characterizations.

There’s nothing especially mold-breaking here, though an ending moment elicits a gasp even as Apartment 7A ends with a cruel shrug — and perhaps the best thing I can say about that is that now I immediately want to rewatch Rosemary’s Baby. Plus, Garner gives a captivatingly distressed performance as a woman being attacked from all sides, where the only way out is through a window.

Maintaining a feel-good tone without becoming saccharine, “Rez Ball” is a charmer with enough of an edge to keep viewers on their toes.

Watching Errol Morris‘s urgent reminder of a documentary — possibly the most enraging film yet made by a director who’s certainly known how to illuminate infuriating topics over the past 45 years — will raise your blood pressure considerably.

Certain twists will remain unspoiled, but “Never Let Go” should resonate with both horror junkies seeking fall escapism and parents looking to see their struggles visualized.

The Deb may not be the most memorable movie musical of the year, but its heart and funny bone are in the right place.

It’s easy to imagine how a version of this film might have descended into vaguely connected sketches (and still would have been one of the funniest pure comedies in forever despite its shapelessness), but there’s a clear and rewarding intentionality to DeYoung’s plotting, and it pays off with a finale that — better than almost any scene before it — perfectly threads the needle between all of the movie’s competing energies.

Although made up of many mesmerizing moving parts, “Harvest” ends up as feeling less than the sum of these. There are sparks of what makes an Athina Rachel Tsangari film great within this impressionistic period fable, even if — unlike the fires that bookend the film — it never fully takes the blaze.

On Swift Horses is a stunning tableau of almost-romances, weaving together ephemeral moments of magic with the pain that inevitably follows when the universe takes them away.

Life may have been very beautiful in this mountain town but even during its most tumultuous years, spending time within it isn’t exactly fascinating.

While Youth (Homecoming) certainly benefits from the seven hours of weaving-machine whir that preceded, the film quite ably stands alone.

"Never Too Late” is a competent but largely conventional look at John, which focuses on the most documented part of his life: His astronomical rise in the first half of the 1970s. With

The film is peppered with comedic delight. Coogan’s deadpan gravitas leads the way in a cast that mostly delivers.

Smooth but vulnerable, clever but anonymous, desperate to provoke a human response but willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done, “Relay” isn’t out to set the world on fire, it just wants to be a hand-crafted thriller that communicates a real sense of personal investment.

The best Springsteen songs sound as if they’ve pulled directly from his diary, and while this “Road Diary” might have a bit more polish and gloss, it’s more than worth the read and the ride.

Two decades and half a dozen films later, everything that made his debut film feel fresh has now curdled like bad milk with his latest pitch black comedy Riff Raff.

The 4:30 Movie owes far more to John Hughes than the Richard Linklater movies that inspired Smith to make “Clerks,” but it contains its own versions of many of the elements that made that film great.

It’s easy to imagine a performer more attuned to deliver intense, driven performances unlock the full potential of this character. As it is, The Cut never quite cuts as deep as you want it to.

Chew-Bose’s directorial debut is a sharp offering that adds to the mystique of the original material and makes a strong case for its own existence.

If Bob Fosse had fallen in love with CGI instead of jazz hands, this is probably the kind of movie he would’ve made.

A compelling genre thriller that manages to build a world that feels both genuinely new and depressingly realistic if human society goes too far down the wrong path.

All of You is an unusual high-concept relationship drama in that its concept seems to have absolutely no impact on the story whatsoever.

King can’t really play a teen anymore, and the message of non-conformity feels stale, in the YA adaptation space and beyond. This trend, much like shifting beauty standards, is already on the way out.

It’s obvious that Robles can inspire people, but the film constantly pokes the audience with explicit reminders of this fact — including a scene where Lopez reads Anthony multiple letters written by children saying that they’re inspired by Robles — that it feels downright insulting.

The Killer’s Game finally gives Dave Bautista a great rom-com part to play, so it’s a shame that his rom-com leading lady isn’t given the same opportunity to fully pop.

The sincerity of Without Blood can’t be denied, but alas, the road to mediocrity is paved with good intentions.

Malcolm Washington’s adaptation of The Piano Lesson is referential, often overly so, and while this version contains its fair share of standout sequences along with Oscar-ready performances, the film never fully coalesces into an effective, singular, emotional narrative.

The film still ends in rousing fashion, but it recognizes something far more profound: There are no actual conclusions in real life, even if we can feel moments of triumph throughout. It’s what next that matters.

As a filmmaker, Flanagan deals in raw, go-for-broke emotion; it’s just that this time around, he’s using that passion to affirm the audience, not disturb them.

For all of the garishly shiny lens flairs that gleam off our heroes’ metallic heads, Transformers One feels rusted over, offering a predictable, formulaic product as generic as its “working title that never got dropped” name.

This version of Speak No Evil, despite an effectively creepy performance from James McAvoy, grinds the unsettling contours of the original into gory, “Straw Dogs”-lite, home-invasion comeuppance pulp in a last act that’s exactly the sort of dragged-out predictable material Tafdrup sought to avoid.

If only Heretic were as serious about religion as any of its characters (either for or against), perhaps the movie’s second half wouldn’t be so quick to descend into contrived parlor tricks and too-basic displays of suspense, but Beck and Woods aren’t really in the business of pushing any buttons.

The Last Showgirl is both the role of a lifetime for Anderson, one that can fully capture her incredible emotional intensity and vulnerability, and (we can only hope) the start of a brand new career for her.

Friedland, who also wrote the film‘s script, is not given over to histrionics or blaring displays of emotion, instead asking us to follow Ruth and experience the world through her eyes. The impact is profound.

No film about the utter demise of a supposed utopia — a real one, to boot! — and the utter infallibility of human beings should be this fun, but we’re lucky this one is.

Mostly, though, it does only that: Shock. Basic, trite, and without any hope for anything better ever happening.

The result is all the good, big words we want to hear about cinema aimed at our youngest audience members: it’s heartening and true and a little sad and incredibly inspiring with a big, ol’ message about the power of community and coming together in the face of major adversity.

Marielle Heller’s version of the story — Yoder is listed as a co-writer — could have taken the magical realist element out entirely, and the film would have played exactly the same. The body horror is downplayed to the point of being functionally nonexistent.

Radwanski’s Toronto-set story isn’t quite a linear, didactic affair drama either, but rather, uses its characters as points of rumination on the present, and its fragile nature, embodied by two people with a complicated past and, most likely, no real future.

Pansy’s general distaste for humanity would make Mr. Burns seem big-hearted by comparison, but Leigh’s faith in the root humanity of Jean-Baptiste’s performance — and in the hurt that guides it through even the broadest moments of humor — allows him to indulge in a variety of laugh-out-loud setpieces without any risk of losing Pansy to caricature.

Baby Invasion has a clearer focus this time: It’s to make you, the viewer, feel bad, and often wanting to beg to the screen, “Please god let this end,” or perhaps more aptly, “end me.” Here is a filmmaker who, these days, resents his own audience. Here is a movie for no one.

In this remarkable and shudderingly unresolved film, blessings and despair tend to become one and the same, two limbs of a shared body that Nina’s patients aren’t allowed to control for themselves.

[A] frustratingly glib biopic.

We know where this is going. That doesn’t dilute the emotional power of it, of a man seeing where his heart really is and what that means in practice.

Costa is, above all, an excellent chronicler of the moods swirling in her nation, but there is a flipside to the way she paints the picture.

The humble visual language is a vessel for a rich human drama. Bear with what sometimes resembles a television movie for the slowburn panorama of life it captures.

Overwrought with visual style but relentlessly one-note, The Front Room is willfully annoying and dubious in its purpose.

Phillips struggles to find a shape for his story without having a Scorsese classic to use as a template, and while a certain degree of narrative torpor might serve “Folie à Deux” on a conceptual level, its turgid symphony of unexpected cameos, mournful cello solos, and implied sexual violence is too dissonant to appreciate even on its own terms.

It’s a muscular, high-octane story about cops living above the laws they’re paid to enforce, and growing more desperate and dangerous with every threat to their unchecked power.

Pavements is an important documentary. It’s a reminder that the fourth (and fifth and sixth) wall can be smashed, that the rock doc can be reinvented. And that when the message is meta for meta’s sake, why not make the medium that way, too?

Guadagnino wants not only to expand your consciousness as a moviegoer, but to cut you open and rearrange all the parts of you that see and feel things when you watch a film at all.

The idea of them getting justice never feels on the table, but the film instead is a path out of the madness of a system where to simply have what happened to their father admitted would fill some of the void he has left behind.

Elegant and confounding in equivalent measure, Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature could’ve used a finishing touch from an American script supervisor.

Pure sense and subjectivity in a way that evokes the same visual magic of Ross’ documentary work, Nickel Boys so viscerally and fundamentally centers the experience of its young Black characters that even the most racist brand of revisionist history could never hope to deny their truth.

Parker and Stone joked that they’ll have to make a lot more TV shows to pay off their ill-fated investment, but it’s entirely possible that Casa Bonita will be a bigger piece of their legacy than anything in their filmography.

Even if Wolfs is a light affair in the end, it’s a smashing good time, confidently told and unpredictable, with two charismatic leading turns that are nearly even upstaged by Abrams.

September 5 works most powerfully as a behind-closed-doors, single-room thriller, even as what we see on a wall of monitors is almost too unreal to believe.

Forget in-jokes or fan service, this is a movie so long on cos-play (much of it brilliant) and short on character development (none of it interesting) that it requires a casual knowledge of the show’s lore to understand, let alone to enjoy.

Corbet and Fastvold’s script is left to engineer a reductive non-climax that illustrates the relationship between capitalist and laborer in the most obvious terms imaginable.

There’s a thin line between kindness and complicity, and “The End” achieves its sneakily immense power by dancing all over it with an ambivalence that Oppenheimer’s previous work never allowed for.

Conclave is far too entertaining to dismiss in a puff of white smoke, even if the film might be a bit too convinced of its own dramatic import.

This riveting and highly unusual shoot-em-up finds Kurosawa returning to his roots, only to discover that psychological terror isn’t quite as abstract as it used to be.

The Order is one of those: yet another Movie We Need Now, but the director inadvertently makes the case that maybe we don’t.

Piece by Piece is ultimately surface-level entertainment, a light, visually-inventive ride without much to offer its audiences beyond a reaffirmation on the values of hard work and believing in one’s self.

It’s the sort of witty, wise, and warm character study we seem to be running out of these days. And that’s just when it comes to its standout dog star, the Great Dane (emphasis on great) Bing.

Fly is divided between thinking all of this is extremely cool and realizing how morbid it all seems, but it ultimately lands on the side of: Yeah, it’s pretty cool. That’s a disorienting feeling for a viewer.

Without Kidman in a fearless turn and Dickinson there to pivot her to the edge, “Babygirl” wouldn’t work as smashingly as it does. This is a sexy, darkly funny, and bold piece of work. Don’t sleep on it.

Kill the Jockey is an elusive and sometimes frustrating watch. It elides interpretation in ways both intentional and undercooked, flirts with a greatness that isn’t fully earned, yet it has some glorious moments and never unseats the viewer.

Larraín’s freeform portrait of the diva’s final days seldom feels like more than a libretto: passionately sung, but lacking the detail and fullness needed to bring it to life.

This sloppy, scattered documentary, very much lacking the refinement of Merchant Ivory’s own films, is a missed opportunity to explore why their films are great, what exactly is it that makes viewers return to them time and time again.

Burton has thrown everything at the wall and then carefully sculpted what has slithered down into a rollicking yet disciplined supernatural caper with a heart.

Clark’s latest is more candy-tart than saccharine-sweet — but for those unfamiliar with his out-there style, this electric portrait of doomsday-defying love serves as a ready-made soft spot for the indie filmmaker.

Sorelle has said that she created “Mountains” as a movie where “between plots lie moments.” How refreshing. Especially since those moments really feel like they exist, more than just “being captured.”

The movie works so well — and remains so light on its feet — because it eschews the life-or-death weight of Woo’s original in favor of focusing on the unbridled joys of resurrection.

The Crow is not a waste of talent or resources; worse, it just hangs there on the screen, as undead as Eric himself.

Although it tells of a production gone ostensibly wrong, My First Film is, at its core, a movie not about upheaval but about yearning — and about how, sometimes, giving that yearning up can be a beautiful, generous act of creation all its own.

An excruciating chase film, a terrifying puzzle-box whodunit, and a testament to romanticizing even the darkest cinema in glowing 35mm, Strange Darling is an outright triumph.

Greedy People is consistently funny, endearingly acted, competently directed, sufficiently twisty, and more than entertaining enough to pass an afternoon when it’s too hot to go outside but too early to distract one’s self with copious amounts of football.

Had Daniels explored all the underpinnings of a horror outing as a dramatic allegory for addiction — as the film‘s opening quote (“I need forgiveness for my sins, but I also need deliverance from the power of sin…”) suggests he might — the director could have fared better than going all the way to ghosts… or is it demons?

It’s lovely, lively, and guaranteed to get kids interested in the wild world around them, all the better if that also includes some outside research into what really happened with Joao and Dindim.

Even if the film‘s ridiculous premise is at least chuckle-inducing — and sold rather convincingly by a cast that all seems to be on the same page about how stupid it is — its convoluted MacGuffin and predictable twists ensure that no amount of expensive action sequences from director Julian Farino or genuine chemistry between Wahlberg and Berry can elevate “The Union” into something worth watching.

“Hard Times” offers no radical change from the (quite deliberately) repetitive construction of “Spring,” but does feature subtle shifts in focus and certainly a lot more in the way of incident and splintering effects.