The title of Private Life, starring Paul Giamatti and Kathryn Hahn as an upscale Manhattan couple trying to have a baby, is ironic. There are fertility issues for both of them — he’s 47; she’s 41 (they're both four years older than that in real life) — so they’re trying IVF, adoption,...

Iron Man, Captain America, and the others in the Marvel Cinematic Universe would probably like to make it clear that Venom isn't part of their program (though it's better than at least one of the Thor movies). The Spider-Man villain, seen briefly in Spider-Man 3 played by Topher Grace, gets a...

(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...

The rare slasher film that's not a sequel to or remake of a previous one, Hell Fest exploits the premise of a traveling Halloween carnival being infiltrated by an actual masked killer who avoids detection by blending in with the hired scarers. Directed by Gregory Plotkin (Paranormal Activity: The...

The premise of Night School, an overlong, under-funny comedy starring Kevin Hart, is that a 35-year-old high school dropout named Teddy Walker has to get his GED in order to get a job. That scenario, while not inherently funny, allows for innumerable complications that could make it funny, but none...

Smallfoot is a light animated adventure set in a remote Himalayan village occupied by yetis, aka Abominable Snowmen (and Snowwomen), who have lived in isolation for generations. Though they have a complex societal hierarchy, the yetis are in many ways a primitive race. Their sacred stones tell...

(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...

Jack Black opted out of the Goosebumps sequel in order to make The House with a Clock in Its Walls, which is basically a Goosebumps movie but based on a different set of YA novels. Kids' movies are a good place for the cartoonish, rubbery actor, doubly so if he's not the main character (a little...

Assassination Nation, based on the hashtags #woke and #metoo, is an in-your-face, self-consciously edgy satire about a town called Salem that goes witch-hunting after everyone's online accounts are hacked and their secrets (and nude pics) are exposed. The primary target of everyone's ire is Lily...