Silent Night is more holiday punishment than gift. Featuring a floor-to-ceiling stacked cast and a festive setting and title, one might assume that Silent Night, the…
There’s a potentially great movie buried in Encounter, one that Pearce scuttles in service of a high concept that goes mostly nowhere. Riz Ahmed has…
Black Friday comes loaded with potential, but ends up roughly as enjoyable as visiting a Wal-Mart on the titular holiday. Casey Tebo’s Black Friday, a horror-comedy…
The Feast is a fine feature debut for Jones, building an effectively eerie tone and supporting it with lovely compositions and gnarly inserts. Lee Haven Jones’…
Night Raiders teases a unique dystopian setup, and then fails to meaningfully develop any of its promising parts. In a millennium overstuffed with dystopian presentations, it’s…
Hell Hath No Fury is something of a departure for Jesse V. Johnson, but the director once again delivers a tough, kinetic actioner, here aided by…
Anonymous Animals is repetitive, unimaginitive, and facile in boths its ideas and images. Anonymous, indeed. If, for some misguided reason, you feel the need to create…
One Shot employs its titular gimmick to no discernible value, but its actioner bona fides offer top-notch DTV thrills. Over the course of the last decade…
Ida Red is wholly derivative and overstuffed with subplots, but also delivers a lot of grimy, gonzo actioner fun. Writer-director John Swab has a few C-level…
The Deep House is a claustrophobic, otherworldly bit of throwback horror that welcomingly pivots away from modern, flattened genre sensibilities. Forget indie insufferability: it seems vogue…
Antlers is a competently made but shallow horror effort, slathered in trauma-heavy metaphor and a questionable abuse narrative. Writing about new horror movies can sometimes feel…
Next of Kin feels untethered from the Paranormal Activity franchise, an unscary film that resists both its found footage formula and any narrative cogency. Paranormal Activity: Next of…
Last Night in Soho is a seductive and sumptuous Giallo riff, but suffers from a final act that undermines much of the film’s early power.…
The Spine of Night is a grisly, singular work of nerdcore unorthodoxy that occasionally stumbles but manages to stay upright. The Spine of Night is a…
Roh trades only in tropes, and subverts any inherent eeriness with its heavy-handed application of mood. Emir Ezwan’s debut feature, Roh, is part of an emerging…
Snakehead foregrounds its lead actress to magnificent effective, offering a film far more singular than its generic setup suggests. Snakehead starts with a rather deceptively benign…
The Estate succeeds in delivering cult-ready laughs, but feels entirely superficial and neutered as satire. A designer-rags to even-more-riches fable from director James Kapner and writer/leading…
Halloween Kills is a smug bit of a ill-advised fan service with dull kills, sanctimonious plot beats, and little narrative progression. David Gordon Green’s 2018 take…
Broadcast Signal Intrusion is built on used parts, but Gentry executes his vision with queasy dread and necessary ambiguity. Working late nights transferring tapes of old…
The Blazing World is a disarmingly charmless and amateurish series of indie genre check-boxes that amounts to a whole lot of nothing. With horror films in…