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...

Making a horror comedy that successfully riffs on the Groundhog Day formula while simultaneously being thrilling and hilarious is no easy task, and yet director Christopher Landon did just that with 2017’s Happy Death Day. That he could deliver an equally (or near-equally) satisfying follow-up to...

Fighting with My Family would be nothing more than a routine underdog sports story if it hadn't been written and directed by Stephen Merchant, the gangly Englishman responsible for most of the funny things Ricky Gervais has ever said on TV. In Merchant's unlikely hands, this fact-based account of...

Robert Rodriguez is a filmmaker best known for delivering heightened stories about antiheroes tinged with western flare and an anything-goes attitude, wearing his influences (grindhouse, horror, exploitation) on his sleeve as clearly as longtime friend and fellow filmmaker Quentin Tarantino does....

There's nothing the world needs less than another King Arthur movie (unless it's another Robin Hood movie), and that's why Joe Cornish didn't make one. Instead, the man behind minor cult hit Attack the Block (whence came John Boyega) made The Kid Who Would Be King, set in the present day, about a...

In the horror genre, scary children have become worthy of a sub-genre all their own. From The Omen’s Damien to Gage in Pet Sematary and the slimy ghost girl in The Ring, horror films have proven that it doesn’t take much to turn an innocent youngster into a creepy little embodiment of pure...

(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...

A young makeup artist named Gloria travels down to Mexico to help a friend win a local beauty pageant. After witnessing a shooting at a dance club, Gloria’s friend is kidnapped and she finds herself caught in the crossfire between the corrupt Mexican law enforcement and a local cartel. Gloria is...

(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...

Serenity is: A) an early contender for the worst movie of 2019; B) a bonkers attempt at beachy noir starring Matthew McConaughey as a fisherman named Baker Dill; C) a bizarrely perfect companion piece to The Book of Henry; D) all of the above. The answer is, of course, D – all of the above....

M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable was arguably years ahead of its time. Released in 2000, five years before Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, Shyamalan’s low-key superhero/supervillain origin story was the sort of grounded comic book film that studios are still trying (and failing) to make....

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...