Think of Julius Avery’s Overlord as a reminder from a major Hollywood studio that Nazis are really bad.
The film’s victims are pawns in a super-gory bacchanal, which is aesthetically striking but emotionally dull.
The film is a rallying cry against a suffocating patriarchy that rapes its servants and disenfranchises its daughters.
Peppermint, Pierre Morel’s first feature film set in the United States, is brainless propaganda for the MAGA market.
Despite some realistic touches, Straight White Men, as directed by Anna D. Shapiro, goes to lengths to call out its artificiality.
Like the teenagers at its center, Hot Summer Nights tries too hard to look cooler than it ever could be.
The film is preposterously conceived, but Stephen Susco so tightly, excitingly executes it that you hardly notice.
The horror throughout the film is dramatically connected to the struggles of poor and marginalized people.
Schimberg’s film isn’t much of an argument, just a provocative discussion.
Kyle Wilamowski’s film trades not in a nostalgia born of genuine lived experience, but of cinematic clichés.
Paramount’s Blu-ray, which is most notable for its reference-level soundtrack, stays true to the film’s mutative beauty.
There’s a lot of sexual violence in the film, but it scans as unimaginatively repulsive and blatantly misogynistic.
As a performer, Joshua Jackson is sober and endearing, projecting goodness.
Director Jeff Wadlow’s Truth or Dare is, overwhelmingly, a silly horror flick that’s unconcerned with its silliness.
Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead veer away from the deeper, even meta-cinematic, implications of their plot.
Throughout, the film raises metaphysical issues of physical and psychological autonomy only to gloss over them.
Alex Garland’s film gets momentum from the deeper it pushes into the uncertainties of ecology and the self.
Eventually, the filmmakers reveal the secrets they’d previously withheld, spoiling the film’s sustained mystique.
The fourth film in the Insidious franchise, directed by Adam Robitel, is lazy and sometimes even loathsome.
The film is by and large a conspicuously manufactured thriller that moves between manipulative psych-outs.