Leave it to the Coens to select a lesser Cormac McCarthy novel for their first literary adaptation attempt and turn out an all-time movie masterpiece. In this godforsaken world, fate is both a lie and the only truth, and since the stakes are set high early — $2 million in cash and a heap of shot-up corpses — the tension produced by this contradiction makes the blood run in sheets. Its spectacularity of this sort as a crime thriller might…

Nothing in Cherry 2000 makes even a little bit of sense, neither in the plot nor in the larger world. (I can't resist the urge to spell out the most egregious of these fundamental noodle-scratchers: why would Lester execute all trackers on sight instead of trying to do business with them?) It's also not consistently entertaining; it sags in spots and can't quite get its comic tone dialed in crisp. But at least it's got bravado and a heart, if…

Robert Eggers has taken the ur-text of the vampire and denied all its potentialities, poetic, psychosexual, and political, exchanging them for extra helpings of gore and dim filth, and dozens of the kinds of earsplitting jumpscares that recall the nadir of the slasher period. His fear of Dracula’s classiness, added to his awareness of the reputation he’s earned as a fussy stickler for period detail, has made him fatally insecure, and so we get this studied baseness as compensation, this totally…

Dudsville. It makes Ex Machina look brilliant by the number of things it either doesn’t consider at all or puts into contradiction with other things, and the campy vibration by which it excuses these oversights isn’t nearly strong enough to compensate; the humor rarely breaks all the way to the surface* and the violence doesn’t match this energy, nor does it shock to the point of stirring real fear — it’s graphic but flat. Plus, though Quaid is good, “toxic nice…