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.

That’s the true power of Affleck and Bernthal’s collective charm offensive: They can make a junky story about a computer-brained savior of human-trafficking victims resemble a whimsical hangout session.

Pulling focus from what is essential to The Legend of Ochi, from acting to artifice, throws the experience into haze–and not the fantasy kind, either, but the distended, stumbling kind that lets the pace go limp as the themes go slack. It’s to Saxon’s great credit as a visionary that The Legend of Ochi justifies the experience anyway, on the strength of its rare craftsmanship alone.

Aside from these weaker moments, April is overall equal parts disturbing and enthralling, arresting and miserable; a gorgeous slow-burn pressure cooker that culminates in a quiet condemnation of the powers complicit in women’s suffering while offering no catharsis.

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.

Sinners is a vampire story with something to say about America’s unresolved sins and reinforces that Coogler is one of his generation’s best filmmakers, mining something fresh from every genre he tackles.

Categorizing Dead Mail is the exact sort of detective challenge faced by those sorting letters in the film’s post office dead letter unit: It’s a psychological aesthete crime story with occasional giallo tendencies, a film that will immediately become one of the strangest and most unconventional things on Shudder.

As a blistering exercise in sustained tension, Warfare works. As a depiction of the toll war takes on the body and soul, well, it’s pretty good at that, too.

Drop is ultimately a nice movie about an abuse survivor being terrorized by seemingly omniscient forces, loaded with moments that don’t really hold up to scrutiny and well-sold by Fahy’s performance.

Psycho Therapy’s screenplay derails it in its closing minutes with genuinely whiplash-inducing abruptness, running out of gas when it’s still seemingly far from its natural finish line.

Before we get to its many faults, it’s worth noting G20 gets one part of its concept correct: casting Viola Davis as the President. Getting the vibes right when casting your President is the most important first step when making a film in this subgenre.

If Hell of a Summer is supposed to spoof the horror movies it resembles, it never settles on a satirical point of view from which to approach them. If it’s supposed to actually imitate them, well, even worse; the original Friday the 13th is no classic, but it’s got a damn sight more atmosphere than this.

A Minecraft Movie‘s fan-pleasing salvation is knowing when to Do The Thing; it understands why its audience pulled themselves away from their consoles and PCs to spend an afternoon in the theater and delivers it to them with diamond-pickaxe precision.

Together, these intersecting storylines yield more than enough funny, gross and surprisingly sweet moments to keep Freaky Tales chugging merrily along, even though it feels quite clearly calculated for the midnight festival crowd in particular.

The Friend asks, often with a good-natured smile, what can and must be salvaged from tragedy, and how we make room for this hazmat effort in a hectic life.

Though it’s a slighter production, Oliveros’s film still has plenty to recommend it, with his smart direction and a raft of fun performances making for an engaging hour and half.

I am a constant skeptic of romantic comedies, but for a Hallmark-ish feeling rom-com that withholds any substantial emotional exploration of much of its subject matter, The Life List List still managed to charm me.

On its terms, and especially with an ending I read as ambiguous, The Woman in the Yard is also unflinching enough to maybe count as daring, and maybe Sollet-Cerra’s most viscerally moving film. It’s also among his least playful, least comforting. Your anxieties can’t follow you around if you can barely make it out of bed.

It’s tough to watch Secret Mall Apartment and not fall under the spell of Townsend and his earnest collaborators, possessing as they do the idealism and righteous conviction of young people in a bygone era who are quite certain that they’re going to change the world.

The film, where two broken yet kindly individuals find within each other acts that elevate their emotional mood, is surprisingly effective and truthful. Much of this is due to the strong performances, especially by the two leads that never succumb to being maudlin or obvious even when the situation edges towards the farcical.

At times arrestingly suspenseful, at others bitterly funny, but often inert in its transitions, Misericordia is an occasionally confounding mixed bag, but one that stands out for the realistic recriminations of a place where grievances run deep and mercy comes with strings attached.

Ash could be a rumination on the nature of identity, or the destructive colonial spirit of Americans, or the indescribable horrors of a world beyond our own ruined one, but despite all of its cranked-up imagery and sometimes-confusing storytelling, it’s tidier and less thought-provoking than any of that – a genre exercise, capably extended.

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

There’s a lot of talent on the screen, some catchy music, and some wonderful visuals and design choices, but none of it ever quite adds up to something bigger, leaving us with a film that’s ambitious but strangely hollow.

Snow White is really one of the better Disney remakes.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl details the ways tradition is exploited and warped, and to whom’s favor, gently at times, and with a steely edge at others.

It’s all perfunctory, paint-by-numbers, and played out, without the spark or personality that separates journeyman wrestlers from the real stars.

Ultimately, Borderline’s various threads threaten to unravel, but it succeeds in making a point about delusion and both unrealistic expectations and the lies we tell ourselves to make it through the day.