Sporting an overly cutesy and clever-aspiring title that confounds as much as it explains, Expend4bles marks the fourth film in the long-in-the-tooth action franchise The…
Sebastien Marnier’s latest breezy, twisty thriller The Origin of Evil may lack any deeper interrogation in its Agatha Christie-reinvention of deception, but its strong ensemble…
An indie horror film about a young woman trying to keep her inner beast at bay, it’s a testament to Jacqueline Castel’s My Animal that…
Youssef Chebbi’s horror-tinged police procedural Ashkal (being released in the States officially as Ashkal: The Tunisian Investigation) begins with a brief explanation of The Gardens of Carthage,…
In a rather brazen move, the third title card in the end credits of new horror flick Don’t Look Away reads as a dedication to…
Ellie Foumbi’s Our Father, the Devil takes the broad, familiar strokes of the revenge drama and fashions them into something altogether more tragic. The film…
In a recent think piece for Salon, critic Sam Adams asks “Where did all the hacks go?” He’s mainly talking about Disney’s penchant for foisting…
Dead Shot opens in south Armagh, what the British soldiers call “Bandit Country,” in 1973 on a border ambush gone wrong. In pursuit of IRA…
Genre filmmaking is in a weird place currently, and has been for a while now. Self-referentiality, endless didacticism, and an absence of any sense of…
Cory Finely’s Landscape With Invisible Hand is an innocuous, flimsy little sci-fi movie, bandying about high concepts and reasonably detailed world-building but resolutely refusing to…
Jared Moshé’s Aporia is a rare thing indeed: a high-concept, hard sci-fi head-scratcher that still feels human-scaled thanks to sensitive performances and focus on familial…
Hong Kong auteur Soi Cheang is a modern B-movie master whose works have dipped into an assortment of subgenres. Cheang’s aesthetic language is in constant…
For centuries, humanity has found ways to outsource certain aspects of childbirth, but these advances were mostly limited to wet nurses, surrogate pregnancies, and, later,…
The latest in Anno Hideaki’s reimagining of classic Japanese tokusatsu stories, following Shin Godzilla, Shin Ultraman, and — depending on how you look at it…
The cold open of Yugo Sakamoto’s Baby Assassins sequel — called Baby Assassins 2 in boring press materials, while its title card uses the charmingly…
Sympathy for the Devil rehearses a familiar thriller conceit that is unsurprising from the outset. It opens with the affable everyman protagonist, the Driver (Joel…
No doubt this has been said elsewhere already, but the most effective horror traffics in an unreality that’s very much tethered to our real world.…
Writer-director-indie provocateur Neil LaBute strikes again with Fear the Night, the filmmaker’s third feature in less than 12 months. This sudden ubiquity is either a…
From the outset, writer-director Laurence Vannicelli’s Mother, May I? appears to contain little in the way of originality, a two-character chamber drama that is also…
It’s the week leading up to Halloween and a child wakes in the middle of the night, having been roused by an unexpected, unsettling sound.…