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 wonder of being out of the house for the first time in four months, Alma, his guide into the…
Held manages to best Cluff and Lofing’s The Gallows, but it still an abysmal, problematic, and tension-free failure. The new marriage-in-peril thriller Held comes courtesy of directing duo Travis Cluff and Chris Lofing, the two dudes responsible for 2015’s found-footage horror flick The Gallows,…
The Unholy is a jump scare-centric, heavy-handed horror slog with little atmosphere and even less mystery. Keeping the good old-fashioned huckster spirit alive, Sony’s genre imprint Screen Gems is releasing the new Catholic-tinged horror flick The Unholy just in time for Easter. It might’ve been…
Every Breath You Take is a derivative, cliché-riddled yawn that would be more at home on late-night cable than on theater screens. While its title might suggest otherwise, Vaughn Stein’s third feature — after 2018’s noir-thriller Terminal and 2020’s family-drama Inheritance (not to be…
Honeydew is the latest effort to angle toward the elevated horror label without providing much substance to this framework. Premiering at the Nightstream Film Festival last year (its planned run in Tribeca’s slate nixed as a result of pandemic restrictions) to muted, though mostly…
The Courier doesn’t rank among the spy film greats and misunderstands its own core, but it’s a diverting enough shadows-and-cigarettes throwback. The Dad Movie of 2021 arrives with The Courier, Dominic Cooke’s sturdy historical thriller chronicling the two men responsible for halting the Cuban Missile…
Rose Plays Julie ultimately relies too heavily on well-worn revenge tropes at the expense of any substantive study of identity. So cold and somber that it becomes dramatically inert, Rose Plays Julie aspires to be a metaphysical investigation into identity but instead gets swallowed up…
Come True is an empty-headed, poorly-conceived horror flick that mistakes endless stylistic detail for substance. Anyone who has ever experienced night terrors can attest to the indescribable, otherworldly horror that only the human mind is capable of conjuring; to even attempt to replicate such a…
Cosmic Sin is an affront to shoestring filmmaking, delivering a final product entirely bereft of imagination and lazy in execution. Does Bruce Willis even watch the movies he appears in these days? Rumors about his paydays — including a ridiculous million-per-day price floated in recent…
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 the center of Choi Jae-hoon’s The Swordsman is a cipher. Given the slightest bit of backstory and played by…
