Mehnificent

If there’s a chill in “The Stranger”—and there is, a gray-blue, suffocating fog that seeps in under the doors and seeps, ultimately, into your bones—it is not the chill of intellectual rigor, or even of well-honed genre machinery. No, what Thomas M. Wright (whose name, one suspects, is stiflingly respectable but also suspiciously absent from the pantheon of directors who actually terrify us) gives us is a thriller so restrained in its horror, so unsure of its own human subjects, that it might have been devised by police proceduralists who, after a long day filling out forms, briefly remembered they had souls. “The Stranger” is heavy with atmosphere, but the air is so thick it deadens more than it haunts.

There’s something almost perversely frustrating about watching a film that’s desperate to be important but allergic to getting its hands dirty. Small Things Like These turns the Magdalene Laundries—a subject with the fury of a thousand scandals—into a very slow, very wet walk in the Irish mist. You...

There’s a certain kind of preemptive relief that washes over you when you enter a theater (or, as the streaming era mandates, your living room) already anticipating disaster, and then discover the film in question is just—well, not quite as calamitous as you’d braced yourself for. “Under Paris,” Xavier Gens’s new entry in the ever-indestructible shark-ploitation genre, is that rare specimen: a movie aiming squarely for the gutter, yet content to wallow in the predictable muck of mediocrity rather than launching itself into the fireworks of glorious failure. Reader, I was steeled for a catastrophe; I got something amusingly, frustratingly in-between—a B-movie so determined to be ‘meh’ that it wound up swimming in place.

When I first boarded Snowpiercer, I didn’t brace myself for a study in controlled chaos on rails—a high-concept apocalypse that whips by so quickly, you barely have time to clutch your sensibilities, let alone your popcorn. If, in the first ten minutes, you thought you were signing up for just another dystopian drudge, Bong Joon-ho’s locomotive vision, at once fevered and hermetically sealed, sets you straight: settle in, there are no real stops, and derailing is not on the menu.