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…
Kindred doesn’t achieve much more than powering through a laundry list of tired indie horror film clichés. A studio releasing its seasonal horror offering one week…
With The Dark & the Wicked, Bryan Bertino opts for cheap ominousness at the expense of developing the film’s implied psychological subtext. It’s unfortunate that…
Synchronic does many things well but ultimately fails to must the creative energy its directors typically bring. In Synchronic, the new film from directors Justin Benson…
Despite the formidable presence of Angela Bettis, 12 Hour Shift is a half-assed and visionless throwaway. 2002 was a breakout year for actress Angela Bettis, as she…
Possessor is an artfully ultra-violent and surprisingly empathetic mash-up of futuristic and retro genre influences. In Brandon Cronenberg’s debut film Antiviral, there’s a line of dialogue that…
Ava is a generic, poorly-shot, and utterly pointless entry into the female assassin subgenre. Tate Taylor must be the most charming man in the world. There’s…
Relic is a nifty work of ambiguous horror built on the duality of destruction and creation. Relic, the debut feature from Japanese-Australian director Natalie Erika James,…
Color Out of Space is a willing 80s horror throwback but relies on its foregone status as future cult film rather than developing anything truly excellent.…
Peter Strickland is a stylistic maximalist, an homage specialist who makes Tarantino look like a film school pedant. Along with Helene Cattet & Bruno Forzani…
Operation Red Sea, Hong Kong director Dante Lam’s latest military epic and follow-up to 2016’s Operation Mekong, is also loosely based on a true story:…
Ominous portents abound from the first moments of Joachim Trier’s Thelma: the film opens with the unsettling sight of a man pointing a hunting rifle at…
In her promising first feature, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Iranian director Ana Lily Amirpour forewent the feminist messaging her film’s title might…
After last year’s tepidly-received Journey to the Shore proved a curious misfire, Kiyoshi Kurosawa chose to return to the familiar motifs of his most successful…
Initially presenting as another in a long, increasingly ossified line of rural neo-noirs (see also Out of the Furnace, Cold in July, Bad Turn Worse,…
Mr. Six is a Chinese fusion of John Wick and Taken that’s also director Guan Hu and star Feng Xiaogang’s Gran Torino: Spurred on by the abduction of his son and the…
Martial-artist and filmmaker Sammo Hung, responsible for some of the greatest films in the genre’s history (Eastern Condors, Pedicab Driver, Encounters of the Spooky Kind,…
Robert Eggers’s debut film arrives prepackaged with the usual hype garnered by a Sundance homerun. Now a year removed from that successful premiere, however, assessments of The Witch have…