Lee Israel was a journalist who made a living writing well-regarded biographies before falling on hard times after the failure of her unauthorized 1985 Estee Lauder book, which Lauder undermined by preemptively releasing an autobiography. The excellent Can You Forgive Me?, based on Israel's own...

The 2018 Halloween is a direct sequel to the 1978 Halloween, and it exists in a timeline where there were never any other sequels, not even the one that erased the other ones. Michael Myers killed four people that night (that's not counting his sister Judith 15 years earlier) and was evidently...

Ryan Gosling is a handsome man, but it's his profile that's most aesthetically pleasing. We saw a lot of it in Drive, where he sat behind the wheel of a car and was was often photographed from the passenger seat, and we see it again in First Man, where he's a test pilot in a cockpit. The pilot,...

Los Angeles’s biggest genre festival, Beyond Fest, just wrapped its sixth and most ambitious program. Fifty films played at Hollywood’s historic Egyptian Theater, with ancillary showings in Downtown L.A. and Santa Monica, with a range of cinematic madness on display — from the West Coast...

(Streaming on Shudder.) Buenos Aires is rife with supernatural activity in Demian Rugna's Terrified (Aterrados), much of it centralized to a particular street (perhaps because of zoning?). The manifestations are frequently chilling, as when a man who hears a recurring "thump" sound investigates...

(Screened at the 2018 Fantasia Festival; now available on VOD and Blu-ray.) I never saw Tales from the Hood, but if Tales from the Hood 2 is any indication, I must go back and watch it posthaste -- though I wonder if the racial climate of 1995 could have inspired as much righteous anger and...

After last year's bumpy edition of Fantastic Fest, roiled by revelations that its founder had continued working with employees and associates who'd been credibly accused of sexual assault, this year's raucous genre celebration felt almost normal — well, "normal" for an event that includes a...

(Screened at Fantastic Fest; now streaming on Netflix) Continuing the Wind River cycle of movies about outsiders going to cold, sad Indian reservations to investigate tragedies, here's Hold the Dark, another brutally chilling drama from Green Room director Jeremy Saulnier. Adapted by...

David Lowery's last movie, A Ghost Story, was about a ghost but wasn't a horror film. His new one, The Old Man & the Gun, is about a career bank robber but isn't a heist thriller. Lowery keeps you on your toes if you're a judge-a-movie-by-its-title kind of person, and he upends expectations...

(Screened at Fantastic Fest; U.S. release TBA) We have Velvet Underground to thank for the title Strike, Dear Mistress, and Cure His Heart, but the movie of that name is from one Mickey Reece, an independent Oklahoma auteur who has made two dozen movies in the last 10 years that have been seen...

(Screened at Fantastic Fest; U.S. release TBA; opens in France in January) Coming-of-age metaphors collide messily in Savage (Les Fauves), a weak-willed French drama by Vincent Mariette in which teenage Laura (Lily-Rose Depp), spending the summer with cousins at a campground, is intrigued by...

(Screened at Fantastic Fest; IFC Films will release it in the U.S., date TBA) Despite its happy, Irish-sounding title, Donnybrook is bleak misery porn about meth and meth-adjacent Midwesterners scrambling to survive and/or kill each other. It's compelling stuff, written and directed with mean...

(Screened at Fantastic Fest; U.S. release TBA) Keep an Eye Out is the latest absurdist lark from Quentin Dupieux, whose Rubber -- about a series of murders committed by a sentient automobile tire -- is one of my favorite absurdist larks of the current century. Called Au Poste! in its native...

(Screened at Fantastic Fest; U.S. release TBA) You can tell pretty quickly that something is up with One Cut of the Dead. It starts in an old warehouse serving as the set of an amateurish, low-budget zombie movie, where the director, Higurashi (Takayuki Hamatsu), is having trouble getting...

I skipped out on the big political event of the Toronto International Film Festival, the premiere of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9, a screening at which the director brought out Flint residents and Parkland survivors to drive home the immediacy of the documentary. Moore’s films are designed...