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...

(On HBO.) 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 Barreto, Mandy is hungover, and her memory of the previous night is only slightly...

(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...

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...

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...