Somewhere Quiet is a thriller, not just a moody exercise; it knows when to step back from the issues it raises and deliver real suspense.

Vannicelli weaponizes therapy-speak where other titles become preachy, uses role-playing as an abusive confusion tactic, and provokes a rather alluring mindf*ck that doesn’t have nor need all the answers to captivate viewers.

While it has a few action sequences that hint at the gloriously overblown operatics that define the middle era in the series, Resident Evil: Death Island doesn’t work as either camp or as something more self-serious, making for an underwhelming scuffle with the undead.

Make no mistake: Puppy Love is a bad movie. This isn’t an exact precise calculation, but it certainly seems like at least 30% of the 106-minute movie are montages.

Army of the Doomstar prioritizes well-earned sentimentality over grisly comedy, and balances the film’s heart with the best animation of the series to date.

This inept, unpleasant, cobbled-together debut only reveals its first-time helmer as a Dr. Frankenstein about to lose his license.

The payoff is grand, as a macabre exercise and a moving gut punch.

In Water has more of a sad-sack quality than the semi-spirited chattiness of In Our Day, yet its images of young people wandering around in search of inspiration, artistic or otherwise, also have a shivery, ghostly edge that makes the melancholy feel earned.

The Conference is one of the better slashers released this year if you’re in the mood to watch liars and brown-nosers get hacked, skewered and brutalized to bits, pulling overtime at the right moments.

Deep Sea‘s lavish visuals bring to life its fantastical aquatic daydream.

A standard-issue horror barely making the move from short to feature (it’s only around 80 minutes before credits), The Moogai is a scare-free blunt instrument, imprecise and uninterested in its own genre beyond its potential for metaphor.

Love Machina may want to take a peek behind its own curtain every once in a while for a reality check.

Through its deeply flawed cast and Peter Pan-esque world caught in stasis, Maboroshi communicates the suffocation and silver linings of being trapped within a particular point in time. Part elegy and part celebration of the past, it makes for an evocative, unusual ghost tale.

It’s everything a teen horror movie should be—messy, bloody and even steamy at times—but doesn’t add much to the slasher clichés we’ve seen before.

Stand-up comedian and actor Esther Povitsky stars in Drugstore June, a coming-of-age crime story where social media makes for a dangerous weapon, boredom an impetus for a full-scale detective investigation, and youthful delusion an impressive decoy for charm, depth, and dimension.

Hopefully if they make a second installment in The Tearsmith series, those behind it will dare to step a little further outside of their self-imposed genre restrictions.

What initially feels like a budget presentation about the issues of being stuck in space and several proposed solutions (explored at various lengths) ends up feeling both too structured and, eventually, too scattered for its fascinating yet still speculative subject matter.

While its plotting can’t quite keep up with its fantastical flourishes, My Oni Girl still proves a pleasant, albeit slight production with just enough going for it to appeal to 2D animation enthusiasts.

The French Italian is frequently clever and observant, but is it consistently funny? Like laugh-out-loud, forget-the-contrivances, hate-the-sin-love-the-sinner funny? Sadly, no. It’s a little too cluttered with dead-end oddities.

Say Anything is an improbable, borderline fantastical love story that feels utterly true. This variation is more believable on paper, yet ultimately plays like moon-eyed fantasy.

In movies like these, heartfelt relatability and comic setpieces (or even just consistently funny dialogue) form their own odd-couple symbiosis; Buffett’s movie feels more like a super-lo-fi Bridesmaids without enough of the aesthetic tradeoff that should come from ditching that movie’s generic glossiness.

Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie is a visually clever, character-redefining film for the strongest of animated smart gals, Sandy Cheeks.

A visually sumptuous and evocative, but uneven feature.

The film chooses to excise almost all of the original’s supernatural elements, opting instead to tell a gritty tale about war and trauma that manages to feel surprisingly modern for all its spears and loincloths.

Extremely Unique Dynamic is stream-of-consciousness comedy, feeling every bit like something that was filmed over the course of five days, as was reportedly the shooting schedule.

Don’t let the film’s attitude or excess fool you: it takes a dim view of the culture in the neck of the U.S. where it’s set, but nonetheless cares deeply for the people trapped there who deserve to live better lives in better places.

As writer, Woody Bess seems to want to drag more weighty pathos into a format that doesn’t inherently support it very well, and it ends up hurting both the film’s dramatic and comic deliveries at the same time, rendering its performances confused, with the exception of veterans like Keith David and Richard Kind.

At such a brisk pace, I Really Love My Husband makes its point with admirable swiftness and sharpness, becoming an often quite funny tragicomedy of romantic disaster, illustrative of what happens when two people with deeply unrealistic expectations collide and rely upon a lack of communication to avoid conflict.

At its most powerful, The Twister is remarkable for the brief moments it captures that are so rarely reflected in an accurate way.

Its performers make the most of their meager resources–they get a lot of mileage out of that baby doll–but in a genre powered by questions of ideology and ethics, Daddy is too milquetoast to memorably deliver its opinion.

A highly subjective horror experience, Fréwaka rarely gives concrete answers as to the reality of what we’re seeing, but that never makes its potent imagery and outstanding performances any less effective.

Macdonald’s film gets plenty creative in its threadwork, but feels like it could still use a few more passes in order to hold together in the long run.

The film only skims here and there the personal elements of how Ramsey’s obsession has shaped her mindset, instead working hard to seemingly unearth juicier “controversy” around the woman where little of it honestly exists in any way that is consequential.

Whether you’re couchbound or attending a midnight screening, Ziam delivers just enough comforting genre delight to surpass the B-movie median–and for streaming horror geeks, that’s all we ultimately need to hear.

Thanks to some excellent FX work and steady performances from its two leads, the film is free to deliver on the monster gore front in a way that is particularly easy for fans of practical FX to admire. Clearly the product of a filmmaker who knew how to work within his limitations and highlight the project’s strongest selling points, it manages to get every bit of meat off those bare bones.

Somnium is an odd bird, a film that is difficult to predict because it’s clearly quite personal and clearly rather uninterested in the genre trappings it has used to dress itself up.

River of Grass is perhaps best described as lightly informative in its tribute to Florida’s vast Everglades and the influence of pioneering ecologist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, more influenced instead by a desire to stir the viewer emotionally and soulfully, to invite them into the bewitching, intoxicatingly thick air of a place where life teems in every direction you could think to look.

On one hand, we have a fantastic central performance, supported by solid direction, decent visuals and sound design, a creepy atmosphere and an effective relationship metaphor. But at the same time, the film is simultaneously being hamstrung by a screenplay that fails to render believable character relationships, falling back on painfully clunky exposition, wooden supporting performances and infuriating character behavior.

Caterpillar is a stunning piece of documentary work, both for its incredible degree of access to both its central character and his journey, and its unconventional style of presentation, which skirts the boundaries of documentary and narrative feature.