Movies

What we have in Until Dawn is less a horror film than a breathless round of charades performed at the world’s noisiest sleepover—everyone putting on their most rubbery "terrified" faces but nobody remembering quite what play they’re in. The filmmakers, with the game’s title in one hand and an empty grab bag of horror clichés in the other, seem to have asked themselves, “Should we tell the story so many cared about?”—and then tossed the question straight down the mineshaft.

There’s something irresistible about the clamor a movie like Us creates, like a distant siren, it lures you not just to watch, but to theorize, to fret, to explain yourself (or explain away the film’s shortcomings with a gesture at its “genius”). Jordan Peele’s sophomore feature has become one of those post-screening litmus tests: Did you see the twist coming? Did you catch all the “clues”? Congratulations, you’re either too clever or, more likely, you’re scrambling in the dark just as Peele wanted. Us is that rare horror film which, above all, wants to be iconic, and while it achieves a kind of feverish originality, it also proves that cleverness can be both a blessing and a curse.

If a Western can still deliver that warm, gently boozy glow, the kind that sits comfortably in the stomach and maybe tickles the mind while you nurse the dregs of your drink, then Unholy Trinity is that sort of well-poured shot. Not the top shelf, mind you, but sturdy and palatable and with just enough bite to remind you why we keep returning to these dusty crossroads. Westerns, after all, are our American fables, endlessly rewritten, and here, under the steady if uninspired hand of Richard Gray, the archetypes are dusted off, creaked upright, and made to dance one more time.

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.