The Fall Guy is a movie befitting its charismatic star, Ryan Gosling, and its stylish action-oriented director David Leitch. It’s not an incredibly intelligent movie, but as an homage to stuntmen and the important, dangerous, and often overlooked role they play in the movie industry, it fires on all cylinders. It’s supported by a decent romance and enough fun action to be a more than passable popcorn film. There might be more than a few things you wish the film did better. It would be nice, for instance, if the film wanted to dive a little deeper into the mechanics behind how stunts are ..read more

Tarot – 6% Reviewer Flickchart Ranking: 5,123 / 5,447 Occult horror is back on the big screen with Tarot. Directed by rookie team Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg, it brings the terror of tarot cards to life with a cast of fresh-faced 30-year-olds playing college seniors. The film centers around a group of AirBnBers who decide to trespass upon a “Do Not Enter” sign and discover a treasure trove of astrological artifacts. Instead of a flesh-bound book of the dead, they find an old wooden case with hand-painted, sadistically-interpreted tarot cards. What derivative horrors await our petty crimina ..read more

The Great Disney Reel Rumble Retrospective reaches a new era! We bid adieu to the Bronze Age as we head into the era known as the Disney Renaissance.  A spark of new creatives took over at Disney and delivered one of its most commercially- and critically-celebrated eras. Let’s dive in! The Disney Renaissance Running for about ten years from 1989 to 1999, many consider the Renaissance not only a resurgence for the Mouse, but perhaps the pinnacle of its animated achievement. Almost all ten of the films produced during this era were massive box office successes. Critics were also quite kin ..read more

Not since David Foster Wallace’s excellent piece “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley” has a piece of media so thoroughly captured the nigh-insanity of tennis and its athletes. Luca Guadagnino‘s career has been making films about passion in all its various forms. Challengers plunges into those passions of romance, of competition, and of ambition. In doing so, it becomes a film that defines the essence of the competitive spirit and is perhaps a quintessential sports film, while also doing what Guadagnino does so well. Physical passion has always been one of his touchstones, and it’s no diff ..read more

  Abigail wields its relentlessly silly premise to great ends, making for a rip-roaring time at the theater, if not always a fully intelligent one. From directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the men behind the recent praised Ready or Not and the two recent Scream films, they deliver more of what made those films so enjoyable: joyous violence, a dark sense of humor, and a playful sense of mayhem. The film follows a group of kidnappers who take their quarry, a little girl who enjoys ballet and is the daughter of a powerful man, to a fancy manor to wait until the rans ..read more

Rarely does a decades-later prequel to a known IP produce anything of quantity. Other notable examples from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, and Halloween franchises mostly crashed and burned, or were mediocre at best. While The First Omen is no masterpiece, director Arkasha Stevenson‘s film is a surprisingly strong film and far better than one might expect from the premise. It’s script and overall storytelling are the largest issues. Stuck with a foregone conclusion based on being a prequel to a known film, The First Omen is necessarily inhibited by a lack of surp ..read more

89% Reviewer Flickchart Ranking: 601 / 5,424 Love Lies Bleeding (2024) stars the infinitely wonderful Kristen Stewart as Lou, a haggard gym manager, and Katy O’Brian as the seemingly naive burgeoning bodybuilder Jackie. Lou is burned out of life; she wears the weight of the past over the entirety of her being. Jackie comes to our story bright, homeless, and willing to do almost anything to progress toward her goal of winning an upcoming bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas. Jackie only sees future.  Each plot beat could feel worn out, recycled indie territory, from the inevitable romanc ..read more

Silly naming conventions aside, the promise of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is certainly there. Godzilla and King Kong teaming up to fight other giant monsters is the exact kind of schlocky premise that can fill theater seats. It’s a concept that invites you to turn off your brain, sit back, and enjoy some mindless violence. And yet, while the film takes some steps forward in giving the giant monsters more focus, rather than repeating the irritating decision of past MonsterVerse films to continually cut away to bland human characters, the film still teeters back and forth between ..read more

Reviewer Flickchart ranking: 2,219 / 5,423 (59%) Newly-minted household name Sydney Sweeney is back on the silver screen in her second team-up with director Michael Mohan, following The Voyeurs (2021). In this film incarnation, Sweeney plays Cecilia, a young American woman preparing to take her vows at a picturesque Italian convent. We are told the convent specializes in late-in-life care for ill and aging nuns. Run by the alluring Father Tedeschi (Alvaro Morte) and Cardinal Merola (Giorgio Colangeli), the convent hints at modern horrors deep within the ancient catacombs below.  Immacula ..read more

For all of the horror sludge that major studios dump into cinemas, there continue to be stalwarts that hold on to a higher standard. The indie and small-budget worlds are where creativity and more expansive concepts for horror movies often thrive. Late Night with the Devil is one such work. Brothers Cameron and Colin Cairnes are not new to horror filmmaking, but this feels like their creative arrival. The film excels in part due to its commitment to an aesthetic. The aesthetic here being a late-night 70s talk show. Positing itself as the found footage of the final broadcast of a show hos ..read more