The year had no shortage of talking animal movies — and might have even hit a nadir with the atrocious Lion King remake where Disney asked us to believe photorealistic African animals moved their mouths to form words like humans. There’s no forced dialogue or anthropomorphizing in Iván Osnovikoff and Bettina Perut’s documentary Los Reyes, […]

Influencer culture is derided at worst, misunderstood at best in 2019. Thankfully there are filmmakers like Liza Mandelup out there documenting it in real time, and the work culminates in her extraordinary documentary Jawline. Taking a sociological scalpel to the booming industry of teenage boys monetizing their social media followings, Mandelup analyzes a world where […]

Movies should be fun, and Happy Death Day 2U may know that better than any movie released this year. It’s a time-bending, convoluted mess, a movie that shouldn’t work at all and dares you to dislike it. Picking up where the first movie left off, the sequel follows college girl Tree as she gets transported […]

Ready or Not is an explosion. In a year filled with entertaining, highbrow movies about class disparity, it was a lowbrow counterpart. Its ambitions were less nuanced, but more effective for their bluntness. Set at a wealthy mansion, the movie follows a young woman as she’s hunted by the family she’s just married into. The […]

The dominance of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has essentially crowded out the kind of smaller-scale, diverse superhero stories that are more common in comic books. Julia Hart’s Fast Color is exactly the type of story about people with superpowers that a smaller comic-book company might pick up, but it was barely able to make an […]

J.D. Dillard’s fascinating survival horror movie Sweetheart premiered at Sundance and was produced by the genre specialists at Blumhouse, who’ve made hits of smart horror movies including Get Out, Unfriended and Happy Death Day, and who also produced Dillard’s first film, 2017’s Sleight. Yet Sweetheart bypassed theaters entirely, opening exclusively on VOD and digital video […]

The “home invasion” subgenre has been flipped on its head a number of times, enough that Villains’ concept of two petty criminals breaking into the home of a couple of actual demented psychopaths isn’t exactly new. Like numerous other exercises in genre, however, Villains’ aim isn’t to blaze a new trail but instead have a […]

In the social wasteland that is the end of the 2010s, empathy seems to be on its way out. Daniel Scheinert, one half of the directing duo that made 2016’s similarly scatological tale of understanding, Swiss Army Man, returned in 2019 (along with collaborator Billy Chew) to ask: What if you could take a tasteless, […]

In spite of its pedigree as writer/director David Robert Mitchell’s follow-up to surprise horror hit It Follows – and the fact that it played in competition at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival – Under the Silver Lake was only accorded a token theatrical release this past spring (if being shown in two theaters for all […]

Gaspar Noé is the living embodiment of the adage that nothing exceeds like excess, a filmmaker whose works are designed to overwhelm the senses, events to be experienced (or endured) rather than narratives to be followed. A Dionysian dose of decadence and depravity, Climax is cut from the same cloth as its predecessors, pivoting between […]

Of the four zombedies released this year — also including The Dead Don’t Die, Little Monsters, and Zombieland: Double Tap — it’s the Japanese import One Cut of the Dead that breathes new life into the genre of the living dead. A massive success in its home country, the film earned small notice and acclaim […]