169 Best Releases From the Genre Horror (Page 4)
Fixation
SimilarBatman Begins (2005), Dirty Dancing (1987), M*A*S*H (1970), Saw IV (2007), Twelve Monkeys (1995),
Mercedes Bryce Morgan directs Fixation, an uneven but fascinating psychological drama about a woman who undergoes an unorthodox version of therapy.
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival)
Mercedes Bryce Morgan’s Fixation is the kind of film that seems to have been created specifically to play in the late-night slots at film festivals. It's a dark and hallucinatory mix of Pink Floyd: The Wall, Synecdoche, New York and a offering from the Lifetime network, and while I can't exactly say I completely liked it (or could even pass a quiz regarding its particulars), it's presented with enough energy and daring that it's easy to overlook that it doesn’t quite come together in the end. Continue Reading →
Pearl
Watch afterBarbarian (2022),
StudioA24,
It's safe to say that no one necessarily asked for a sequel to Ti West's X, especially six mere months after its release. Not because it was bad, mind you; it was actually quite good, a nifty throwback to Texas Chainsaw Massacre with a hefty soupcon of Debbie Does Dallas tossed in the mix. But its tale of a ragtag amateur-porn crew besieged by a murderous old country crone envious of their youthful beauty and raging libidos hardly cried out for a followup. Yet here we are with Pearl, a prequel that dabbles in decidedly different genre homages but might just be the superior slasher of the two. Continue Reading →
Ich seh, Ich seh
Ask someone if they’ve seen 2014’s Goodnight Mommy, and if their immediate response is to shudder, you’ll know they have. The Austrian cult horror film combines so many tropes – psychological horror, body horror, paranoia, twins, creepy kids, creepy moms, etc. – that it seems like it should be an incoherent mess, but is instead a tightly paced, relentless assault on the nerves. Even the trailer is creepier than many mainstream horror films, while only showing a tiny bit of how bad things get in it. Continue Reading →
Barbarian
SimilarFrom Russia with Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964), Saw (2004), Saw II (2005),
Watch afterBlack Adam (2022),
Studio20th Century Studios,
It can be hard to write about films sometimes. No mere words, no matter how witty, insightful, or elegant, can truly capture the experience of watching the most surprising ones. Except for movies like Zach Cregger's (The Whitest Kids U'Know) new horror/thriller, Barbarian, which I can encapsulate perfectly with a few phrases: Continue Reading →
らんま½ 劇場版 決戦桃幻郷!花嫁を奪りもどせ!!
SimilarKill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004),
Watch afterBlack Adam (2022), Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), The Equalizer 3 (2023),
StarringMegumi Hayashibara,
StudioStudio Deen,
The new horror film The Invitation opts to take a cue from Smash Mouth’s “All-Star” and hit the ground running. The very first scene of Jessica M. Thompson’s latest directorial effort depicts a woman deciding to escape a lavish home by way of suicide. With the help of a piano string and a medium-sized statue, she’s soon a corpse dangling in the living room of this mansion. Accompanied by pronounced cues on Dara Taylor’s score and claps of thunder, this demise is a striking way to kick off a movie. It’s also, unfortunately, emblematic of a critical narrative misstep from which The Invitation never quite recovers. Continue Reading →
Orphan: First Kill
We’re currently in the middle of a horror renaissance, which makes it easier to forget what a bleak time the 00s were for fans of the genre. A dull selection of sequels, reboots and limp, watered down remakes of J-horror, with only a blessed few exceptions it seemed to be heading towards the same “death by ubiquitousness” as musicals had years earlier. Then, in 2009, horror was given a bizarre little jolt with Jaume Collet-Serra’s Orphan, which starts off as a standard killer kid movie, a la The Bad Seed or The Good Son, then goes gloriously off the rails, with a twist that left audiences not just surprised, but shouting “What? What? What?” at the screen. Continue Reading →
Warm Bodies
Watch afterBarbarian (2022),
Like many movies about people who use their phones and social media in excess, each viewer's individual enjoyment of director Halina Reijn's Bodies, Bodies, Bodies may hinge on their tolerance for Twitter jargon. Newcomer Sarah DeLappe's horror comedy screenplay is sharp and funny when it's not bogged down by an excess of 2020s slang. The heavy use of internet-speak isn't a problem for the first two acts. By the third act, though, it feels glaring. Continue Reading →
Day Shift
SimilarBack to the Future Part III (1990), Beverly Hills Cop III (1994), Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006), True Romance (1993),
Watch afterTop Gun: Maverick (2022),
It’s fascinating to watch a movie that could have been made any time within the past 30 years. That’s not the same thing as “timeless,” I’m talking about a movie that just feels like the script lingered in development hell for possibly decades before finally getting made, with only the slightest bit of tweaking to bring it up to date. Netflix’s new horror-comedy Day Shift could have been made in 1996, 2005 or 2012, and the only thing that would need to be changed is the cell phone technology. Like a lot of Netflix’s original content, it’s polished, yet dull, with a budget that doesn’t explain how forgettable it is. Continue Reading →
Carter
SimilarAlex Strangelove (2018), Beverly Hills Cop (1984), Rosemary's Baby (1968),
Perhaps out of fear that he will miss 100 percent of the shots he doesn’t take, Carter director Jung Byung-gil has compiled 100 shots into a single take—proverbially speaking. In the stuntman-turned-filmmaker’s latest—his first for Netflix and to feature English—every setpiece links into another; you can count on the passenger plane shootout to link up with the pig truck chase later on, and so it goes. As long as Jung scores each of these opportunities, it doesn’t matter if the bridging between moments will be smooth or rocky. Continue Reading →
They/Them
StudioBlumhouse Productions,
It’s well past time for a mainstream horror movie that addresses the very real dangers the LGBTQIA+ community faces. Self-proclaimed “allies” in particular need to see what it’s like to have your bodily autonomy, your right to love, and even your right just to live peacefully put at constant risk, by people who think they’re acting on the side of righteousness and virtue. Continue Reading →
Nope
A look back at the use of chimpanzees as clowns & sidekicks for humans, & how it relates to a strange & haunting subplot of Jordan Peele's hit sci-fi horror.
Note: this article contains spoilers for Nope. Please read Jon Negroni’s spoiler-free review here.
If you haven’t seen Nope yet, you might be a little puzzled by references to a character named Gordy, especially once you learn that Gordy is a chimpanzee. It’s understandable: there’s not so much of a glimpse of a chimpanzee in any of the promotional material for Nope, and nothing that happens in its trailers seems to suggest that a chimpanzee will play any part in it. Continue Reading →
Lux Æterna
“It’s not politics. It’s poetry!” one of the many voices screams approximately half an hour into Lux Aeterna (stylized, of course, as Lux Æterna). With that line, Gaspar Noé’s 51-minute movie—now available on digital three years after its 2019 Cannes Film Festival premiere—reaches the self-awareness at which it often paws. That opener is partly a joke in and of itself: Noé’s auteur work has relatively veered toward the quote-unquote apolitical. The politics, inherent as they are to the art of cinema, have fleshed themselves out by accident. Here, the spontaneous “poetry” of Lux Aeterna—an extrapolation of sorts of his previous film, Climax—lives on a prosaic approach. Continue Reading →
The Black Phone
SimilarMinority Report (2002), Saw II (2005), The Shining (1980),
Watch afterJurassic World Dominion (2022), Thor: Love and Thunder (2022), Top Gun: Maverick (2022),
Gather around, children, and let Auntie Gena tell you a story about days gone by. Long ago, up till around 1984, kids used to run free in the streets from dawn till dusk, with virtually no adult supervision. Was it a better time? Not really, just different, and it all came to an end with the collective belief that bad things happen to children who aren’t carefully watched at all times. Now it’s swung so far in the other direction that allowing your children to walk themselves to school may result in a visit from child protective services. Scott Derrickson’s The Black Phone takes place in the time before, when parents didn’t worry about monsters until they were almost under their noses. Continue Reading →
Crimes of the Future
SimilarMississippi Burning (1988), Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004), Rope (1948),
StudioIngenious Media,
As Marvel holds its iron grip on theaters, and Netflix seems determined to focus its dwindling profits on churning out generic action movies starring various iterations of Ryan Reynolds, cineastes lament the loss of “art” films, those outliers that, whether good or bad, generate far more lively after-movie conversation than Spider-Man ever could. And yet, right now we seem to be in the middle of a weird movie renaissance. We have the joyful weirdness of Everything Everywhere All at Once, the all too topical weirdness of Alex Garland’s Men, and the over the top spectacle weirdness of Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming Elvis. What better time could there be for David Cronenberg to come roaring back to form with some body horror weirdness in Crimes of the Future? Continue Reading →
The Innocents
In the first scene of Eskil Vogt’s sophomore feature The Innocents, a young girl pinches her autistic older sister while riding in the car. Her sister doesn’t react, so she pinches harder. The morality of Vogt’s latest ebbs and flows with this girl, her sister, and their two new friends, all of which have an odd connection, not to mention supernatural abilities. Kids have a gray version of right versus wrong, as violence sputters around the Norwegian thriller, minimal in technique but tense in execution. Continue Reading →
Firestarter
Similar2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Metropolis (1927),
Watch afterJurassic World Dominion (2022),
Did you leave the gas on? Or does this movie stink? I’ll be here all week, folks. Continue Reading →
The Twin
SimilarRosemary's Baby (1968),
Though it resulted in some of the finest genre films of the 21st century, including The Babadook, Hereditary and Midsommar, it wouldn’t be all that bad if we got a break from horror movies that are about grief for a little while. Real life is about as bleak as it’s ever been, and while horror has always in some way reflected current events, maybe we can take a breather and return to a brief, glorious run of masked killers or radioactive giant rats. If not for that, then because it’s a genre that’s no longer bringing much to the table except more suffering and anguish. Taneli Mustonen’s The Twin, while well-acted and capably directed, seems almost committed to trying nothing new with the genre. Even a third act twist that essentially negates everything that happens up to that point is derivative in its own separate way. Continue Reading →
Cat People
These days, when confronted with a film made in the past featuring material that comes across as somewhat outre by contemporary standards, it's practically to remark that there's no way such a thing could be made in these comparatively staid times. In the case of Paul Schrader’s Cat People (1982), one comes away from it not only thinking that it couldn’t be made today, but wondering how in the hell it was able to get made back when it did. Bloody, erotic and suffused with a level of kink rarely seen in a putatively mainstream project, this go-for-baroque spectacle was an outlier when it first came out 40 years ago and that feeling remains undiminished to this day, along with its ability to simultaneously raise eyebrows and libidos at every turn. Continue Reading →
Umma
Sandra Oh has always had range, and her demonstration of it for viewers has always been spectacular. However, the feat she’s pulled this month will be tough to trounce. Oh has folks turning red one Friday and blanch white the next. And she pulls off the jaw-dropping swing in an on-screen mold as traditionally restrictive as “mother to a teenage daughter.” That said, whereas Mrs. Lee in Turning Red strives to adapt whenever possible, Amanda (Oh) in Umma refuses to. Continue Reading →
X
As the discourse rages over how tame the mainstream movie scene can be—with its sexless heroes and bloodless violence—it can be tempting to elevate any film that hearkens back to "the good old days" of sex and slashers just for the sake of its own supposed transgressiveness. But luckily, Ti West's X largely earns that title, a playful and idiosyncratic ode to both ends of the '70s sleaze cinema spectrum (hardcore porn and Wes Craven-esque slashers) alike. Not only that, it's blissfully literate towards its influences, with a nod to larger points about the aesthetics and politics of desire, the fetishization of youth, and so much more. Continue Reading →