It's laudable to convert harmless childhood games into horror premises, but Truth or Dare does it with such rote blandness that the movie is actually less suspenseful than a real game of truth or dare. Directed by Jeff Wadlow (Cry_Wolf, Kick-Ass...
Rampage is one of the better video-game-based movies, a low bar that it clears only by forsaking the entire premise of the game. The mid-80s arcade hit had one objective: with a giant gorilla, giant lizard, or giant wolf as your avatar, you...
As a proponent of the "shut up and watch the movie" school of thought, I have a special fondness for films that actively encourage silence. The tense and thrilling A Quiet Place does it by putting its characters in a situation where making noise...
It is a time-honored tradition that teens in movies make pacts with one another to lose their virginity, but seldom are those teens female girls of the young lady gender! That makes Blockers different from the typical raunch-com -- that, and the...
Ready Player One is set in a future where people spend most of their time in a virtual-reality world called OASIS that allows them to play games and have adventures in whatever fictional settings and with whatever fictional characters they choose...
You remember, of course, how a breach at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean produced a gateway through which extra-dimensional Godzillas entered our universe and wrecked our cities, and the only way to stop the destruction was to build giant...
Not only are the SXSW programmers an astute bunch of film enthusiasts who scour the globe for the finest in independent cinema … they also really dig horror flicks.
Of course you'll always find a solid batch of scary, suspenseful movies tucked...
“Growing up can be a little bit scary and weird,” explains Kayla (Elsie Fisher) in one of the YouTube videos that frame Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade – and also, it seems, articulating one of the many running themes in this year’s SXSW Film...
On Saturday, March 10, every film that screened in The Paramount - SXSW’s premier venue in downtown Austin – was directed by a woman. It was representative of this year’s lineup, with the strongest showing (at 33% of features and 59% of...
Love, Simon is the first film about a gay teenager's coming out ever distributed in wide release by a major studio. We've seen mainstream films with queer youth as supporting characters, and numerous coming-out-centered films that played the...
Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, first published in 1962, is one of the most beloved young adult novels not to have already been turned into a movie (except for a 2003 TV version that nobody, least of all L'Engle, liked), so Disney's new...
Eventually, the cold and pitiless Red Sparrow is about a young Russian woman who becomes a spy and gets tangled up with a CIA operative running a counter-mission. It takes a while to get there, though, and when we do, it's not the kind of...
What we know at the beginning of Annihilation is that a lighthouse was struck by a projectile that fell from the sky (seldom a good omen) and that Natalie Portman, in hospital clothes, is being interviewed by three men in hazmat suits who want...
Black Panther is a bold entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, not (just) because there are hardly any white people in it but because there's almost nothing connecting it to the other films. Apart from the obligatory Stan Lee cameo and...
The Winchester Mystery House is a real place in San Jose, Calif., built in 1883 and expanded upon by its owner, Sarah Winchester, who married into the rifle-making family and inherited much of its wealth when her husband died. It's supposed to be...
