Because of embargoes, a lot of our critics aren’t able to share links with you until release day. Here are some last-minute reviews for this weekend’s upcoming films. We’ve kept in all the reviews posted yesterday as well so you can have more help in deciding what to see (if you haven’t already).
Our critics have been hard at work reviewing the latest films. Here is a look at what’s coming out this weekend (in select cities, check your local listings) and what else may be in theaters right now.
Opening: Oct. 23-25, 2015
Wide (United States)
Jem and the Holograms
[New Reviews Today] For member reviews of this film, follow this link
The Last Witch Hunter
[New Reviews Today] For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension
[New Reviews Today] For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Rock the Kasbah
[New Reviews Today] For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Expanding (United States)
Steve Jobs
[New Reviews Today] For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Limited (United States)
Extraordinary Tales
- Excerpt: …Extraordinary Tales leaves us wishing for more: more running time, more of Poe’s material, more of Garcia’s macabre animated magic.
[New Today] Mark Dujsik @ Mark Reviews Movies
Carson Lund @ Slant Magazine
- Excerpt: Part of the scholarly skill of Extraordinary Tales is demonstrating the vitality of Poe stories even in brutally compressed form. The accounts depicted here—The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Facts in the Case of M Valdemar, The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Masque of Red Death—have been told and retold in various mediums ad infinitum over the decades since Poe’s death, but rarely with such artful truncation.
I Smile Back
David Bax @ Battleship Pretension
- Excerpt: I Smile Back is, according to the goals it set itself, a successful movie. But is that the same as being a good one?
Laura Clifford @ Reeling Reviews
- Excerpt: Sarah Silverman delivers the type of performance typically labeled as ‘brave’ because her character debases herself. She’s fine in the role, but it’s not revelatory nor anything that raises the film above a slog.
Nasty Baby
David Bax @ Battleship Pretension
- Excerpt: Nasty Baby‘s biggest asset is its cast. Silva and Adebimpe are fearlessly raw with one another, while Wiig continues to impress with her devotion to every idiosyncrasy and emotional wrinkle of her characters.
[New Today] Mark Dujsik @ RogerEbert.com
Shaandaar
Kathy Gibson @ Access Bollywood
Suffragette
[New Reviews Today] For member reviews of this film, follow this link
2015 Films In Theaters Now In Select Areas
All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records
[New Today] Sean Burns @ Movie Mezzanine
Assassination
- Excerpt: At once an old-fashioned action-adventure of the sort Harrison Ford once felt so at home in, an elegiac historical drama with shades of Sergio Leone, and a guts-and-glory shoot ‘em up that recalls Inglourious Basterds, Choi Dong-hoon’s Assassination offers up plenty of bang for its buck.
Beasts of No Nation
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Black Mass
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Bone Tomahawk
[New Today] Frank Swietek @ One Guys Opinion
Bridge of Spies
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Carol
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
A Christmas Horror Story
[New Today] Jeremy Kibler @ The Artful Critic
Crimson Peak
[New Reviews Today] For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Death Valley
[New Today] James Jay Edwards @ FilmFracture
[New Today] Kristin Dreyer Kramer @ NightsAndWeekends.com
Experimenter
[New Reviews Today] For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Freeheld
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Futuro Beach
João Pinto @ http://www.portal-cinema.com [Portuguese]
Goodnight Mommy
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Goosebumps
[New Reviews Today] For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Hotel Transylvania 2
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
James White
- Excerpt: James White is an unerringly personal, often devastating study of a fundamentally decent guy — if emotional mess — struggling magnificently to get out of his own way
Labyrinth of Lies
[New Reviews Today] For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Legend
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Listen to Me Marlon
[New Reviews Today] For member reviews of this film, follow this link
The Look of Silence
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Love
[New Today] Courtney Small @ Cinema Axis
The Martian
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Mi America
Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat @ Spirituality & Practice
- Excerpt: A harrowing portrait of the virulence of racial hatred in a small New York community.
Northern Soul
Pan
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2
Kathy Gibson @ Access Bollywood
Room
[New Reviews Today] For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Sicario
[New Reviews Today] For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Sleeping with Other People
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Slow West
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Some Kind of Hate
Something Better to Come
David Bax @ Battleship Pretension
- Excerpt: Something Better to Come is more than a film about the homeless. It’s a look at humanity itself stripped down to its basics, which include survival but also, touchingly, companionship, cooperation and affection.
Son of Saul
- Excerpt: Journeys to the very centre of Auschwitz’s extermination apparatus
- Excerpt: Son of Saul‘s narrow scope provides unsensationalized, unsentimentalized, as-yet unseen look at life in the camps.
Spectre
[New Today] Stefan Pape @ HeyUGuys
The Suicide Theory
Gregory J. Smalley @ 366 Weird Movies
- Excerpt: A great setup, and well-acted, but it runs out of steam at the end; it doesn’t slay, but call it a near-miss.
Tangerine
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Tiger House
João Pinto @ http://www.portal-cinema.com [Portuguese]
- Excerpt: It’s very bad and very simple…..Do I have to say more?
The Transporter Refueled
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
The Tribe
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Trumbo
- Excerpt: … an engaging, heartfelt romp through McCarthy’s America.
Truth
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Unexpected
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Victoria
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
When Marnie Was There
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
White God
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
The Wolfpack
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
The Woods
Daniel Lackey @ The Nightmare Gallery
Yakuza Apocalypse
- Excerpt: What’s worse than a bad film? A film that squanders its potential.
Youth
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Z for Zachariah
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
2015 Films (Coming Soon)
11 Minutes
- Excerpt: The fundamental question any film must ask itself is, “Why tell this story?” In the case of 11 Minutes, the twenty-fifth film from Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, the problem is exacerbated: why tell these stories, any of them?
AfterDeath
The Brand New Testament
Diego Salgado @ Guía del Ocio [Spanish]
The Brothers Quay in 35MM
- Excerpt: Wonderfully obscure, uncompromising and un-commercial, unlike the films inspired by them, The Quay Brothers in 35mm is a singular filmic experience.
The Crossing II
James Marsh @ South China Morning Post
- Excerpt: A film – based on the historical event – billed as “the Chinese Titanic”, The Crossing tells the true story of the Taiping, a heavily overloaded Shanghai-Taiwan ferry that sank in 1949, killing more than 1,500 passengers. Or at least, the final half-hour of John Woo Yu-sen’s sprawling two-part epic does. Eventually.
Desierto
- Excerpt: … a tense little thriller that plays like The Deadliest Game set along the Mexican-American border.
Don’t Grow Up
- Excerpt: … feels like an art-house film that’s sold out or else an adolescent zombie film playing dress up.
Emelie
Jared Mobarak @ Jared Mobarak Reviews
- Excerpt: The film is definitely not for the faint of heart or cautious parents already too paranoid to let their kids grow up with the same childhood they probably had. Because while drawing on the walls or eating sweets are frowned upon and grounds to get the babysitter in charge fired, what Emelie does next should make parents’ skin crawl.
Estranged
Green Room
- Excerpt: A first class exercise in teeth-grinding suspense
- Excerpt: Green Room has a nihilistic streak to it that may deter those who like a moral to their carnage. We, however, can’t wait to see what’s next on the palette.
Hellions
Daniel Lackey @ The Nightmare Gallery
High-Rise
- Excerpt: Impressive, hilarious, uncompromising filmmaking
- Excerpt: Once the sex, drugs, pillaging, and paint make for a heady brew, but by the time you sober up you may wonder quite what it was all about.
Jackie Boy
The Lady in the Van
- Excerpt: … The Lady in the Van is a chip (in the sugar) off the old Bennett block.
The Lobster
- Excerpt: Being John Malkovich meets The Notebook with script notes by Franz Kafka
- Excerpt: … as a rhythmic meditation on love and loneliness, it might even provoke you to reconsider your current relationship status.
Love & Peace
- Excerpt: Wild, warm and rather wonderful
- Excerpt: Combining a kaiju movie with the Game of Life is tonally inconsistent, but there’s a lot of wacky, family-friendly fun to be had in Love & Peace’s vibrant, lurid, and surprisingly catchy 117 minutes.
Naciye
Office
- Excerpt: … without any particularly memorable tunes, though, let alone a real showstopper, and characters with less depth than the 3D…
Paper Planes
[New Today] Stefan Pape @ HeyUGuys
Prescient
Jared Mobarak @ Jared Mobarak Reviews
- Excerpt: The most outlandish revelations are right out of a soapy melodrama too as the grittily severe drama of the beginning gradually erupts into an almost comical series of circumstances leading Theodore to believe he can set things right. The truth of the matter is, however, that he can’t.
Price of Love
The Program
- Excerpt: Frears plays his film as an energetic crime thriller
Remainder
- Excerpt: Omer Fast’s adaptation of Tom McCarthy’s book draws into focus the theme of fate vs. self-fulfilling prophecy.
El Rey de La Habana
Diego Salgado @ Guía del Ocio [Spanish]
Ryuzo and His Seven Henchmen
- Excerpt: … a light knockabout affair that, at 125 minutes, becomes slightly long-winded in the final telling.
They Look Like People
Jared Mobarak @ Jared Mobarak Reviews
- Excerpt: Blackshear therefore takes the idea of worldwide chaos and distills it into the apartment of two close friends. Trust becomes paramount as the projections leading them off their own respective cliffs start pointing fingers to justify a wholesale purge of negativity and the unknown.
The Wave
- Excerpt: As Arvid says, “Once mountain gets ahold of you it never lets go”, and that’s certainly true of the crystalline beauty on display here — it’s just a shame Åkerneset couldn’t have held itself together a bit longer.
The Witch
- Excerpt: This is how horror movies seemed when you were too young to watch them
