Jacob Oller

Taken as a whole, the faction-shattered drama between exploited tourists, reckless experts, proud pros, and the unforgiving mountain is as brutal and clear as ice.

Heart Of The Beast wants both to soak in its testosterone-drenched fable, where a man and a mutt (and a military supply of equipment) can overcome everything, and find the softer underbelly of that same tale, where man’s best friend can also function as a surrogate recipient for his stifled emotions. It’s sometimes admirably gentle in that latter regard, but so much of the film is spent putting on a blandly tough face that this small glimpse at vulnerability comes, in what might also be relatable for the men it’s aimed at, too late to matter.

Filled with silly Universal Monsters-spanning imagery and nary a word of spoken dialogue, the ultra-accessible stop-motion feature provides a kid-friendly on-ramp to another genre while mostly eschewing the more obnoxious trends of modern feature animation. It’s simple, soft, and warm, like a stuffed-animal version of a horror movie: inoffensive and, to a select group of kids, likely essential.

The 90-minute B-movie so deftly juggles gags and gross-outs that, when it’s finally boxed in by the larger demands of IP, it’s as tragic as watching a beloved character succumb to the dehumanizing effects of a virus. But that transformation wouldn’t hurt so much if we didn’t care about what we’d lost.

The best thing you can say about The Fix is that its hawkishness, and its star-spangled greed, has proven timely.

Instead of immersing us in this conflict, The Uprising drowns in it.

A compelling piece of straightforward true-crime that makes the most of its throwback form.

Getting caught up in the film’s mounting obsession feels like falling headfirst into a Wikipedia rabbit hole, tumbling into darkness and data until dawn breaks over your bloodshot eyes. It’s a rush and an addiction, deceptively bookish, where repetition is part of the process and digging deeper is the only way through.

It’s completely ineffective when it comes to its intentions, but its failures are easy to enjoy.

The Whisper Man never finds even the B-movie thrills of a similarly close-to-home child-abduction drama like Prisoners, instead flipping through its airport novel plot and discarding it as such without much thought. More disheartening, it never allows its capable cast any room to work within the intensity that comes with the territory, reducing all their emotions to a dull murmur.