Daniel Isn’t Real movie review: or is he?
Stylistically sophisticated and psychologically insightful, this is an exquisitely ambiguous and inventively disturbing mashup of body horror, demonic possession, and Lovecraftian science fiction.
horror
The Turning movie review: it’s screwed
Strips away the ambiguity of the source story to leave us with lazy jump scares, visual gloom, and a cheap cheat of an ending. Gaslights its protagonist and, incredibly enragingly, the viewer, too.
Doctor Sleep movie review: a reckoning with the ghosts of the past
A wonderfully unexpected sort of horror movie, beautiful and delicate, but unsettling, too, with an authentic plausibility to the dichotomy between the invented uncanny and the human response to it.
Corporate Animals movie review: work is hell
Corporate culture gets a delightfully twisted kick in the ass when a “team-building retreat” turns disastrous. As horror vies with comedy, the pitch(black)-perfect cast gets the balance just right.
Phoenix (Føniks) movie review: but will she rise again?
This Norwegian family drama, tinged with fantasy and horror, depicts a teen girl’s emotional turmoil through fantastical, yet oddly pragmatic, reveries. Newcomer Ylva Bjørkaas Thedin is heartbreaking.
It: Chapter Two movie review: it doesn’t float
A bigger misfire than its predecessor, and a waste of a great cast. Unsupportably overlong, with a feel-good self-care denouement that’s almost dangerous. The only terrifying thing here is the tedium.
Gwen movie review: a frisson of fright on the farm
Atmospheric mood — this is a dour nightmare in the stark gloom of 19th-century Wales — and a striking performance by Eleanor Worthington-Cox aren’t quite enough to sustain this near-horror film.
Midsommar movie review: välkommen to weird Ikea
It’s hard to escape the sense that Ari Aster is getting off on Florence Pugh sobbing and screaming as he fetishizes her terror and torment. And none of it is in the pursuit of any meaning or message.
In Fabric movie review: retail shock therapy
A murderous dress and creepy shop clerks add up to nothing more than exhausting nonsense full of fetishizing of women and weirdness for weird’s sake alone. Consumerism is killing us, or something.
Endzeit (Ever After) movie review: there will come soft rains
This German zombie flick offers horror with a spin of feminine steel, not soft but brutally maternal, as necessary as natural selection and as nurturing as civilizational, even planetary tough love.
