The Craft: Legacy certainly has its heart in the right place, but the effort ultimately amounts to little more than superficial virtue signaling. The easiest observation to make about The Craft: Legacy, the reboot/sequel to 1996 cult favorite The Craft, is that it is woke.…
Spontaneous tries to be too many things at once, and ultimately doesn’t scratch the surface of any of them. Spontaneous is a lot of things: sci-fi, horror, romance, tragedy, coming-of-age. The one thing it fails to be, however, is compelling; writer-director Brian Duffield is…
Let’s Scare Julie fails to deliver on even its most basic promises, leaving the viewer unscared and uninterested. The big hook of the new teen horror-thriller Let’s Scare Julie is that it takes place in real time, designed to look like an 83-minute unbroken…
Shithouse marks a promising debut from writer-director Cooper Raiff, effectively capturing the awkwardness and insecurity of the collegiate experience. One’s reaction to the coming-of-age dramedy Shithouse will likely depend on how one relates to its central protagonist, Alex (writer-director Cooper Raiff), a white, middle-class,…
Gay indie cinema is full of well-meaning films centering on toned, good-looking twenty-somethings searching for deeper connection while overcoming their demons and past traumas. By that measure, co-director/co-writer/leading man Matt Fifer‘s Cicada fits right in, depicting the tentative relationship that develops between Ben, a…
A masked man breaks into the home of a seemingly happy and well-adjusted couple. She is appropriately terrified; he seems nonplussed by the events, explaining that it happens every night, and that once they incapacitate the intruder, he will vanish. He is right. So…
It takes truly talented people both in front of and behind the camera to make something as abysmal as French Exit, a misfire of epic proportions. Director Azazel Jacobs, while not exactly a household name, certainly showed promise with his previous features, including Terri…
Evil Eye marks an improvement on the first wave of Welcome to the Blumhouse titles, but remains a mostly ineffective at developing either genre styling or any visceral power. Evil Eye, the latest release in Amazon’s exclusive Welcome to the Blumhouse film series, carries on…
There is a kernel of a good idea buried somewhere within the shitstorm that is the new horror-comedy It Cuts Deep. Unfortunately, writer-director Nicholas Santos, making his feature-film debut, has no idea how to extract it, resulting in an insulting and reductive film that…
Vincent Paronnaud’s new horror-thriller Hunted opens with a campfire tale brought to life using a gorgeous animation style that combines black, blocky cut-outs and a background of ethereal gold. The message is bluntly stated: “The company of wolves is better than that of man.”…
