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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The Vigil isn’t without its minor grievances, but its willingness to navigate new horror territory is most welcome. Since the birth of the horror genre, especially…
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…
It’s shouldn’t surprise that Willy’s Wonderland is an amusing enough experience, but it lacks the craft that would make it a more memorable blast. The meme-ification…
Lapsis mines much of its dystopic power through appropriately small-scale world-building and clear-eyed rhetoric. Noah Hutton’s Lapsis is a genuine curiosity, a micro-budget sci-fi feature that…
Crazy Samurai: 400 vs. 1 is a one-man spectacle that is hampered by repetitive filmmaking technique and some sloppy editing. Expectations for Crazy Samurai 400 vs.…
The Reckoning is a tonal and intellectual disaster, nothing more than an exercise in bland, base brutalism. On its face, The Reckoning seems like a strange…
Some of the most elegant and graceful tracking shots ever seen open Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor. They may be drone or helicopter-assisted; the camera, gravity-defying, soars over…
Shadow in the Cloud holds some promise in its early genre goings, but the second half reveals an unfortunate dearth of ideas and charm. It’s never…
Max Cloud is an utter waste of underground action star Scott Adkins’ talents, and curious DTV aficionados should look elsewhere for their genre thrills. For those…
SKYLIN3S is a wonderfully weird and wild addition to the Skyline series and a bright star of the DTV renaissance. Anybody clocking the original Skyline way…
Archenemy nicely compensates for its budget with some bits of visual aplomb, but it amounts to little as the film frustratingly spends most of its time…
Vanguard worships at the feet of CGI and grievously wrongs the past and present of action cinema in the process. Stanley Tong was at best a…
Jiu Jitsu capitalizes on some playful camerawork and Nicolas Cage’s idiosyncratic presence to transcend its DTV trappings. Only in the realm of DTV could something so…