Vicious Fun fails as both horror cinema and horror deconstruction. Wes Craven’s Scream has been justly lauded as an epochal moment in horror cinema, a…
Kid Candidate doesn’t have as inclusive an eye as you’d like, but it still manages a cutting depiction of the institutional rot deep in the…
Director Alan J. Pakula helped usher in a decade of gritty, morally ambiguous New York thrillers with 1971’s Klute, a nervy neo-noir starring Donald Sutherland…
Fathom sidesteps plenty of nature documentary pratfalls, but fails to develop a distinctive voice of its own. In the wake of Planet Earth’s zeitgeist arrival…
F9 continues the franchise’s downward trend, further garbling its outsized action and sentimentality into confectionery pap. What started as a scrappy gearhead ripoff of Point Break…
An Unquiet Grave fails to deliver even scares, let alone substantive plot or character. Horror is a genre that tends to thrive on economy; it…
The hare-brained Queen of Spades rides a wave of stale familiarity to miserable results. For viewers whose formative years have nourished the clickbait addiction of…
Sublet is yet another delicate, moving slice of cinema from one of the world’s preeminent queer chroniclers. Israeli filmmaker Eytan Fox has made a career…
The Evil Next Door forgoes character development and clever plotting in an effort to manufacture cheap scares. Is there anything more boring than a competent,…
Given its material, When Worlds Collide should be a far more impressive visual document. Among the marquee names of the 1980s New York art scene,…
Stalker is a wonderful calling card for Savage, a director who understands both form and function of genre cinema. The new horror-thriller Stalker has much…
Edge of the World is a weak film that further dooms itself by so liberally cribbing from better works. The name and fame of Sir…
Hero Mode is almost charming in its throwback vibe, but its rhetoric is far less appealing. There’s a disappearing niche that films like Hero Mode…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or…
Werewolves Within doesn’t deliver many scares, but it hits an amusing, breezy target that too few horror-comedies manage. Finn (Sam Richardson) is the new forest…
My Heart Can’t Beat… impresses both as psychodrama and horror, the kind of film destined to live under viewers’ skin. There’s an aching sense of…
False Positive plays like a modern riff on Rosemary’s Baby, but executes its updated vision perfunctorily and mostly dully. Even though it’s sort of unfair to stack…
He’s Rick James, bitch, and there’s a great new documentary about him by Sacha Jenkins fittingly titled BITCHIN’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James,…
Reminiscent of Mohammad Rasoulof’s There Is No Evil — another Berlinale competition title that aptly took to task Iran’s capital punishment apparatus — The Ballad…
False Positive Even though it’s sort of unfair to stack False Positive against Rosemary’s Baby, the movie is asking for it, and, unfortunately, the comparisons…