Little of the personality or energy of Barrett’s scriptwork is on display in Seance, a drab, generic horror dud. Since 2010’s A Horrible Way to…
The Paper Tigers doesn’t pull it all together dramatically or narratively, but its genre reverence is a steadying force. Reverence looms large in Quoc Bao Tran’s…
Mortal Kombat is all bland sequel-setting that fails to even deliver impressive fight sequences. Paul W.S. Anderson’s 1995 Mortal Kombat is the most straightforward and…
Boys from County Hell boasts a strong premise, but never entirely commits to either its horror or comedy elements. There’s a cairn out in a…
Vanquish is bad, bizarrely so, but it’s at least not boring in its own dumpster fire way. After a few hits as a writer, including…
Wheatley’s latest both builds and holds tension effectively, harnessing the director’s penchant for psychedelia and bruising horror to brutal effect. When Martin remarks at the…
Night in Paradise scans like any number of slow-burn gangster flicks, but suffers for lack of originality in both its action and drama. Park Hoon-jung’s…
In a vertically-oriented iPhone video, director Julio Hernández Cordón tells his daughter Fabi that he wants to make a movie with her. It will be…
Sponge on the Run could have been a nostalgic charmer, but is instead little more than a bit of cheap brand marketing. After 22 years, Spongebob…
The Swordsman is hamstrung by weak direction that has no idea how to shoot its otherwise well-choreographed action set pieces. The disgraced and retired warrior at…
Earwig and the Witch is one of the ugliest major studio animated works in years and an incredible stumble for Studio Ghibli. Name recognition has little…
Queen of Black Magic is a brutal, go-for-break bit of exciting horror filmmaking. Kimo Stamboel doesn’t have the same profile as Timo Tjahjanto, his filmmaking partner…
Penguin Bloom tries to expand itself a bit from template filmmaking, but mostly still trades in familiar disability narrative tropes and obvious metaphors. Regrettably, there…
Psycho Goreman offers undeniably impressive practical effects and exactly nothing else. In director Steven Kostanski’s Psycho Goreman, two children — brother and sister — dig up…
Julia Hart shows promise but ultimately disappoints with I’m Your Woman, a film attempting to flip the crime genre on its head but only ending up…
Despite its misguided ending, Let Them All Talk remains a refreshingly open-ended and low-stakes pleasure. In the past decade, Adam Sandler has been regularly accused…
Superintelligence undermines its innocuous silliness and any potential rom-com aspirations with needlessly complicated stakes and a fixation on its own high concept. There’s a genuinely charming…
Jungleland is a deeply familiar film that injects little energy or originality into its template narrative. Max Winkler’s Jungleland follows bare-knuckle boxer Lion (Jack O’Connell) and…
Synchronic does many things well but ultimately fails to must the creative energy its directors typically bring. In Synchronic, the new film from directors Justin Benson…
The Witches isn’t immune to some familiar children’s cinema pratfalls, but its hyperactive energy and Zemeckian set pieces keeps things mostly singing. Robert Zemeckis’ 40-odd-year career…