David Ayer stumbles badly with his latest LA gangster flick. The Tax Collector is violent and gruesome as hell, but poorly written with an absurd plot. The characters behave nonsensically in a world of obvious betrayals. Ayer also tries to incorporate religious and familial themes. It’s a disjointed effort that ultimately fails on both counts.

The Secret Garden is lavishly adapted for the fourth time on the big screen. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic children’s novel gets a twenty-first century visual effects makeover from the steady hand of Harry Potter and Paddington producer, David Heyman. The film ably captures the magic and innocence of the book. It stumbles somewhat in the

Paydirt is a godawful Guy Ritchie knockoff that fails utterly as a heist flick. A British parolee wrangles his old crew for one last big score in the California desert. Luke Goss does his Jason Statham impersonation surrounded by painfully dumb supporting characters. Who’ve got nifty nicknames like “The Brit”, “The Babe”, and “The Badass.”

An unexpected encounter forces a bereaved widower to remember a fateful summer with his father. Out Stealing Horses vividly captures the transition from innocent adolescence to hardened adulthood. Adapted from the prizewinning novel by Norwegian author Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses is a deeply spiritual, beautifully shot coming of age drama. It examines how tragic

From writer and director Kyle Couch, the new apocalyptic thriller The Tent is a bit of an emotional roller coaster, consistently building up to a powerful ending that will stick with you for days. An end-of-days tale of survival set in a world that’s been ravaged by an event known as the Crisis, The Tent

Radioactive is a biographical romance about the life and impact of twice Nobel Prize winning scientist, Marie Curie. A trailblazer for women at the turn of the twentieth century, she and her husband Pierre transformed the understanding of atomic processes. The Curies created the term “radiation” on their way to discovering new elements. Iranian director

Dave Franco shows promise in his feature directorial debut. The Rental is a lean, Hitchcockian thriller that devolves into a standard slasher film. The first two acts are quite gripping. A seemingly innocent weekend vacation exposes deep rifts between the characters. The tension becomes more pronounced after a well-timed reveal. But instead of capitalizing, the

The Painted Bird is a bleak odyssey of humanity’s darkest instincts. A Jewish boy suffers horrific abuse while traversing an unnamed Slavic country during World War II. Shot in stark black and white, The Painted Bird has graphic depictions of murder, rape, pedophilia, and bestiality. The boy is a witness, and victim, of warzone atrocities.

The Sunlit Night is an arthouse romance oversaturated with eccentricity. Jenny Slate stars as a struggling Brooklyn art student who takes an apprenticeship in remote Norway. The quirky characters, settings, and stylized asides look fanciful but don’t amount to much. A paper-thin attempt at depth detracts from the fleeting humor. The Sunlit Night is a

Something’s in the water in Jeffrey A. Brown’s directorial debut The Beach House, a beautifully grotesque slow-burn body horror chiller that feels as sleek and contemporary as it does like a slight ode to 50s monster movies and the works of atmospheric horror greats. Unique and individually surreal as this low-budget Shudder feature may be,