I found myself undeniably charmed by a lingering warmth in the coldness of Fingernails, no doubt helped along by the performances of Buckley and Ahmed.

Even Dafoe, seemingly incapable of a false note or forced delivery, ultimately must fall in line with the movie’s broad-arc predictability.

Lake of Death would have been better off talking less, and scaring more.

A well-acted, well-reasoned two-hander that struggles to swerve around the contrivances of the genre.

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.

As soon as you unearth a place’s past, it lives on in you—changes you. This is the heart of folk horror that Enys Men speaks to, but its dull, repetitive, padded delivery of images makes its genre findings (in words British enough to befit the film) weak tea.

Cage has never been less than immensely watchable in any movie, good or bad. In those like The Surfer, which falls somewhere in the middle, he continues to prove an unparalleled ability to transcend mediocrity, and turn any performance into a one-man firework show.

Writer Josann McGibbon’s script plays it safe from beginning to end. The potential cleverness of the format is never tested or pushed to explore any truly weird choices for Cami.

Ambiguous, open-ended storytelling is by no means a defect in its own right, but Spin Me Round becomes increasingly frustrating in its tendency to introduce narrative tangents without any intention to elaborate or connect them.

Any time Goodnight Mommy tiptoes toward the brink, there’s a hand waiting to yank it back toward mundanity.

If ever there was a case made that being on the right side of history, in the right place and with the right story isn’t enough to make satisfying non-fiction, Kim’s Video is it.

Christian Swegal’s film is most effective in its early, character-study moments, as it leaves the audience to discover that Jerry, for all of his confidence, has a worldview informed by absolute nonsense.

Boredom. Annoyance. Anger. I experienced a range of emotions and perfected my eye roll while watching Endings, Beginnings, the new movie from director and writer Drake Doremus (Like Crazy).

Unfortunately, Norwegian director Tommy Wirkola’s Hansel & Gretel is just another entry in Bland Fairy Tale Theater, a shapeless riff on those hapless German siblings with the worst parents ever.

Despite the ingredients at hand, Pearce and company never really pull it together in a manner that realizes the potential. The result is a pulp buffet that feels like it should have been a gourmet meal—a Golden Corral of genre conventions (that leaves the audience feeling about as satisfied).

The most frustrating thing about Jeremy Power Regimbal’s directorial debut is there’s part of a very effective thriller here. It’s just not the good part.

A Compassionate Spy is not a thrilling recollection of treason. It has little to say about the actual espionage that Hall pulled off when he was an 18-year-old Harvard grad working on the Manhattan Project.

Really, this is a diverting kiddie movie that struggles most visibly when attempting to graft some kind of moral sensibility onto a story that – spoiler alert? – gets resolved by the good guys hitting the bad guys really hard.

With In the Earth, Wheatley hits a brick wall, but he hits it hard enough that whether one sees the film as successful or not, the effort remains admirable.

The result is a movie that seems more interested in instruction and reassurance than pushing at or playing with sexual kinks. In other words, it’s ultimately about as sexy and unpredictable as a corporate performance review.

By denying us the terror thrills of this no-win situation, leaning into shock and eschewing awe, Bigelow leaves us trundling out of the theater with only the dull ache of impending doom to keep us company. I could have listened to NPR for that.

Farrelly’s too busy making a Big Important Movie instead of making a movie that matters.

Sigh. If only a good cast was enough to salvage a plodding, tedious film from the snowy wreckage.

Bleak and crisp and cold as an Icelandic waterfall, Lamb is a movie with a sheepheaded toddler in great knitwear, the vague looming of something sinister and a filmmaker that can’t seem to wrangle it all.

Though the premise is gripping and the acting overwhelmingly solid, Here Are the Young Men falls short when it comes to communicating the raw emotional essence of preemptively coping for a future in decline.

Instead of exercising artistic liberties over the written word, Louhimies goes all-in on putting those words on screen, a task too great even for nearly two hours of runtime; maybe Attack on Finland would work better if fashioned into a miniseries. Even then, though, it wouldn’t work as the entertainment it aspires toward.

The Killing of Two Lovers is remarkable to behold, but all the technique in the world can’t distract from the holes littering the production beyond cinematographer Oscar Ignacio Jiminez’s lens.

If it’s hard to shake the feeling that The Little Things strives to be Se7en or Zodiac, it still manages to satisfy in a meat-and-potatoes sort of way, delivering its twists and turns effectively while having the confidence to not wrap things up too neatly by the end of its runtime.