This time last year, Hereditary was already being heralded as the best horror film of 2018 following screenings at Sundance and SXSW. And just one year prior, Get Out was praised as one of the best horror films of all time following its premiere at Sundance. Both festivals often yield some of the...

Our ongoing and long-overdue reckoning with sexual abuse and harassment has inspired a new wave of cinema; not only are we seeing more empowering and diverse representations of women and minority groups, but we’re seeing stories that reckon with the root cause of so much of this abuse: toxic...

Over the past few years coming-of-age films have thankfully moved away from typical male-centric stories about teen boys getting drunk and trying to hook up with girls. The genre has come a long way from American Pie and Porky’s, the casual misogyny of the former and the blatant sexism of the...

The plucky, rough-around-the-edges Canadian thriller Level 16 is a Black Mirror-lite story about teenage girls being trained in a creepy, militaristic sort of finishing school called the Vestalis Academy and located in a secret fortified bunker. The girls, about a dozen of them, spend every waking...

In the loudly menacing The Hole in the Ground, a solid debut from Irish director Lee Cronin, young mother Sarah (Seána Kerslake) and her son, Chris (James Quinn Markey), have just moved to an isolated house in the country -- which, not to blame the victims here, never turns out well. Their house...

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 efficiency by Tim Sutton (Dark Night), but I wish the main character were more...

(Now in theaters and VOD.) We in the Northern Hemisphere have this image of New Zealand as Australia's sillier, goofier neighbor. Mega Time Squad does nothing to dispel that impression, being a manic, light-hearted comedy about a nice young criminal who uses time-travel paradoxes to create a...

MOVIES: "Animals" "Before You Know It" "Corporate Animals" "Dirty God" "Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile" "The Farewell" "Fighting with My Family" "Greener Grass" "The Hole in the Ground" "Honey Boy" "I Am Mother" "Little Monsters" "The Lodge" "Native Son" "The...

(Screened at the Sundance Film Festival; HBO Films will release it later this year.) Mandy, the high school basketball player at the center of Share, starts the film by waking up on her front lawn -- not an auspicious way to start the day (or a movie). Played by excellent newcomer Rhianne...

(Screened at the Sundance Film Festival; U.S. release date TBD) Dirty God is in the tradition of English "kitchen sink dramas" and dreary Mike Leigh films, a blunt, bleak story about a working-class person whose already miserable life is made worse by someone else's cruelty. Jade (Vicky...

(Screened at the Sundance Film Festival; Amazon Studios will release it later this year.) In 1977, NASA scientists put out the word that they'd be recording greetings from people from around the world and sending them (the recordings) into space to welcome any potential aliens who happened by....

(Screened at the Sundance Film Festival; HBO Films will release it later this year) Little had to be changed about the plot of Richard Wright's 1940 novel Native Son to make it work with an adaptation set in the present, but something must have been lost in translation. As directed by...

Although it caters to a large community of retirees, the Palm Springs International Film Festival still features its share of daring selections, on a program full of awards favorites (thanks to the festival’s timing, right in the middle of awards season) and official submissions for the Best...

(Streaming on Netflix.) Most of us don't have the exact problems that Alice in Cam has because most of us aren't webcam performers who make a living doing sexy shows online for tips (not that we're judging). But this intriguing if underdeveloped thriller from first-time director Daniel...

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...