Movies

If you thought the nadir of the franchise arrived with Rebel Moon – Part One, Zack Snyder’s kitchen-sink tribute to slow motion and empty spectacle, you are in for a fascinating descent. The Scargiver emerges as less a sequel than a dare—how low can the bar go? If the first film was a parade of hollow bombast, Part Two is the mop-up: a limp, shivering attempt to wring significance out of a narrative so lifeless, you have to check your own pulse to make sure it’s not catching.

Let me begin with a confession fit for the confessional booth aboard some recycled “Star Wars” battlecruiser: I thought Zack Snyder had already bottomed out with Army of the Dead, but Rebel Moon, bless its comic-book heart, is such a spectacular act of creative bankruptcy that it deserves a new wing in the mausoleum of derivative moviemaking. If Snyder’s ambition was to create the world’s loudest, longest Hot Topic commercial—set adrift in a galaxy where all ideas are borrowed and none are cherished—then he’s staged a minor coup.

Let’s not pretend otherwise: “The Beyond” is not a movie that stoops to court your comprehension, let alone your approval. The first thing to say about Lucio Fulci’s 1981 Southern Gothic splatter opera—this fever-dream of congealed dread, oozing viscera, and poetic free-association—is that it laughs in the face of what most filmgoers consider narrative logic. But in so doing, it offers up a delirious orgy of supernatural delirium the likes of which American genre fare, buttoned-up and market-tested, wouldn’t dare attempt.

Steve Buscemi’s Animal Factory wants very badly to be that scalding, claustrophobic plunge into America’s penal underbelly—shadows slithering across dank concrete, sorrow corroding the air, all the usual tropes rattling their chains. But what you actually get is a drab shuffle through the same old cellblock, a movie so enamored of its own grimy surfaces that it forgets to find something compelling lurking beneath. It postures as neo-noir, but it might be the most ordinary thing ever dragged through a barred window.

Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” doesn’t so much open as splatter all over you—like the world’s glitziest acid reflux. Within minutes, you’re somewhere between elation and nausea, the kind that reminds you why you ever loved horror in the first place: it’s meant to rattle not just your nerves but your very sense of what it means to be flesh and woman and watched. Walk in expecting a demure little metaphor about aging, and you’ll find your hands, as mine were, gripping the seat in a bright, queasy trance.

If there’s a pleasure to be found in a political thriller set within the velvet-draped echo chambers of the Vatican, it’s in the sense that every well-pressed cardinal is one false move away from revealing the bit of spinach stuck to his soul. Conclave is a high-stakes ecclesiastical procedural that wants to show you the secret arteries and clogged veins of the Catholic Church—not just a pageant of holy men, but a great, labyrinthine chess game shot through with acid and lamp oil. And if sometimes the chessboard feels more like a conference call where everyone has a different point to make but no one’s listening, the movie at least has the gall to try.

“Life,” Daniel Espinosa’s slick sci-fi scare machine, wants to have you clutching your popcorn like a flotation device, while it slings you around the International Space Station with all the delirious glee of a B-movie with an A-team budget. It’s both a love letter and a ransom note to the genre—cheerfully pilfering from “Alien,” “Gravity,” and every ISS-daydreamer’s worst-case scenario, as if genre tropes were for the taking, like ketchup packets from a diner.

This is supposed to be the season of goodwill, eggnog, and the kind of joy you’re only ever forced to feel in December. But what do we actually get? Sleigh bells drowned out by sirens, cinnamon-scented pandemonium—yes, Virginia, it’s time for movies that crank the holiday insanity to eleven. If Christmas is a circus, why settle for gentle elephants when you could have rabid reindeer? My Christmas list, this year, is for those who like their tinsel twisted: Gremlins, Violent Night, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and, yes, Terrifier 3. Fasten your seatbelt with a candy cane.

Well, I settled into my seat for Alien: Romulus prepared for a ride that might soar or clunk—either way, I was ready to have my nerves worked over. You go to an Alien movie these days with more than just popcorn and a sense of dread; you come armed with a small arsenal of skepticism. Fede Álvarez, bless him, shoulders the Sisyphean task of giving the xenomorph mythos another go, determined to please both sweaty-palmed newcomers and the crusty acolytes who have studied Giger’s monsters as if they were cave paintings. What we get isn’t a catastrophe—far from it. But if your idea of greatness means trembling, wide-eyed awe, Romulus won’t have you seeing gods in the horror flicker. It’s good, yes—just not unforgettable.

Is there anything more perversely thrilling in American cinema than the spectacle of watching a tough man—whose life’s been varnished in blood and bad decisions—suddenly confronted with the plummeting black-out of his mind? “Knox Goes Away,” Michael Keaton’s brooding directorial vehicle (and, yes, he pilots this thing from both sides of the camera), is, at heart, a haunting, slow-burn elegy for the hired gun as the light in his memory flickers and gutters.