A sort of “It” meets “Scream” energy courses through Eli Craig’s film, one that’s clever and thrilling enough in bloody spurts, even if it never quite reaches its true potential.

Director Craig Johnson and screenwriter Kent Sublette (“Saturday Night Live”) find a nice balance for the boo-surprises, creepiness, and humor, with a resolution that brings everything and everyone together.

Control Freak is a film so raw, messy, and sincere that it seems to have been torn from the bodies of the people who made it.

It’s a B-movie operating at the highest levels of craftsmanship, intrigue, and performance.

It can be so refreshing to see an efficient thrill ride of a movie, a flick that knows what it wants to do and doesn’t waste time doing it. Christopher Landon’s Drop is one of those films, a thriller that unfolds in two locations with few characters, all in pursuit of providing as much entertainment as possible to ticket buyers.

It’s a story about how people hide their true selves behind costumes like the perfect wife or even the forced whimsy of Tulip Season. Its tragic misstep is how much it refuses to actually look under those surfaces.

Yes, great musicals have been built on “the power of love” before. But pulling that off requires something this movie never has: a heartbeat.

Writer/director Alex Scharfman’s script is clever, but this truly feels like the kind of project that collapses with the wrong people in it. Every member of this film’s ensemble understood the assignment, elevating this unique creature feature from just another disposable “Jurassic Park” riff into something memorable through their comic timing and group chemistry.

Egoyan has always delved right into fraught familial ties without shying away from ugliness, and “Seven Veils” is perhaps his most overt exploration of familial trauma.

The truth is that pacing often trumps realism, and The Accountant 2 just doesn’t build enough momentum.

Lively is once again fantastic, imbuing this character with a degree of captivating uncertainty that throws off the balance of the film when she’s not on-screen, and the costumes are gorgeous, rising to the level of the stunning scenery. And, once again, the plotting and pacing have a habit of sagging when the film needs to build.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is an uncomfortable but entrancing watch, a tribute to shattering silence around family secrets and bucking tradition for the sake of empathy.

The overall experience of “The Empire” is one that is consistently surprising and rarely dull. That being said, it’s not necessarily successful as a comedy.

Ultimately, the threadbare quality of Constantin Werner’s screenplay cannot be smoothed over with gobs of CGI effects (impressive as some of these sequences look) and the star power of Milla Jovovich and Dave Bautista.

The pacing works referentially to its namesake and real-time ambition, but the characters aren’t quite interesting or engaging enough to sustain attention for the whole runtime, and the film’s crawl eventually wears on weary knees.

It’s the simplicity of the story combined with the excellence of the filmmaking—again, often deceptively simple—that makes it work.

The mechanics of the chase scenes are well-designed, but the overall look of the film is lackluster, the characters are thinly imagined, and the dialogue is oddly obscure in a movie intended for children, especially one that wants to stay on the fun side of scary.

Imagine a J-horror plot involving a child possessed by a swamp demon told through the aesthetics of the screenlife found footage subgenre, and you can pretty much imagine how writer-director Pablo Absento‘s new film, “Bloat,” will play out.

Queen of the Ring isn’t a film I’ll watch more than once, but it’s a story that resonates with me. The nostalgia lands, but the inspiration sticks.

Nearly four years into the Taliban’s rule of Afghanistan, this story, now more than ever, needs the attention and awareness of an international audience. One only wishes for a deeper telling of it; maybe with at least one less Black Eyed Peas song.

Picture This is a rom-com that’s more effective as com than rom, with several big laughs and a thoroughly winning lead performance from Simone Ashley.

What’s frustrating is that I totally agree with everything Bong is saying, I just wish he were saying it with a touch more finesse. Maybe they can do some fine-tuning in the lab for next time.

It could hit harder, however, were its impact not diluted by the overly long runtime and uneven tone. For a movie that undercuts itself for its own amusement, however, intermittently successful is pretty good.

This is a persuasive piece of advocacy filmmaking, tucked inside a playful and profane comedy about female friendship. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry.

Its greatest asset is its performances, which operate in strikingly different registers (some more subtle or ‘naturalistic’ and others more heightened) yet somehow work together to further the film’s story and themes.

There doesn’t seem to be a single original bone in this film’s body that gives you a parade of half-baked comedic scenes braided with a trite thriller and family mystery.

Uppercut feels like it’s two different movies, or maybe two short films, jerry-rigged together into a feature.

Superboys of Malegaon, about film buffs obsessing over films and then making one of their own, is one of the most accessible and entertaining movies about the creative urge that you’ll see.