We have spent centuries dressing Robin Hood in Lincoln green and righteous virtue. He's the rogue who robs the rich to feed the needy—a champion of the common folk laughing in the face of tyranny. But what we often forget is that legends are porous, fragile things, easily twisted into perverse nightmares depending on who survives to tell the tale next. In Michael Sarnoski’s "The Death of Robin Hood," the velvet of myth is violently stripped away, leaving only the blood-soaked mud of 13th-century England and a man drowning in the consequences of his own personally curated mythology. If you have seen the marketing for this A24 release, you might expect two unbroken hours of kinetic, limb-severing chaos. Sarnoski, however, possesses a much more sophisticated compass. He understands that light and dark must hold each other in a perilous equilibrium. What he has crafted is a film of two distinct, staggering halves: a descent into a ferocious hell, followed by an agonizing, slow-burn crawl toward a semblance of grace.

The Evil Dead franchise has long operated on a bloody fulcrum between slapstick lunacy and grueling endurance test. With "Evil Dead Burn," French director Sébastien Vaniček kicks that fulcrum out from under the audience entirely. This is the meanest, nastiest, and ickiest chapter of the saga to date—a film that spills guts with glory and leaves you feeling like you’ve just survived a prolonged, intimate assault. Vaniček doesn't merely want to scare you; he wants to grind your nerves into a fine paste, delivering a wickedly satisfying burn that redefines the modern boundaries of the franchise.

Cinematic terror is too often outsourced to the extraordinary—the masked boogeyman, the supernatural entity, the chainsaw-wielding brute. But Curry Barker’s "Obsession" understands a far more nauseating truth: the most profound evil usually wears a cardigan, averts its gaze, and genuinely believes it's the victim. In dissecting the rotting anatomy of modern male entitlement, Barker has constructed a psychological crucible that completely decimates the romantic comedy’s foundational myth. We have been conditioned by decades of cinema to root for the unassuming, lovelorn wallflower. Here, we're forced to watch him weaponize his own pitiable inadequacy to obliterate the autonomy of the woman he claims to adore.

When Amazon MGM Studios announced they were blowing the dust off the "Masters of the Universe" action figures for a summer tentpole, the collective groan from audiences was audible from Earth to Eternia. We've endured a brutal decade of studio executives strip-mining our childhoods, churning out joyless, algorithmic franchise fodder just to keep quarterly earnings afloat. Yet, director Travis Knight has achieved what most would deem impossible. He hasn’t just defied the cynical corporate mandate; he has crafted a cinematic protein shake of sheer, unadulterated joy.

The word “engagement” used to mean looking someone in the eye. Today, it’s a metric. We find ourselves in an era where the greatest existential threat to a plastic cowboy isn’t a rummage sale or a sadistic neighbor, but a piece of glowing glass. "Toy Story 5" arrives perhaps a decade late to the great screen-time debate, but it compensates for its tardiness with a surprisingly sharp indictment not of the children holding the tablets, but of the exhausted adults who handed them over.

Diet culture is already a horror story; it just usually lacks a physical body count. With "Saccharine," writer-director Natalie Erika James weaponizes the modern obsession with thinness, dragging the quiet, agonizing rituals of body dysmorphia out of the bathroom scale and into the realm of the grotesque. Arriving at a cultural flashpoint where algorithmic beauty standards collide with the unregulated boom of quick-fix injectables like Ozempic, the film doesn't just tap into our collective insecurities—it suffocates them.

To lock a human being inside a rusted, welded-shut metal coffin, drop them into an ocean of blood on a desolate moon, and ask an audience to share their claustrophobia for over two hours is a brazen act of cinematic defiance. Mark Fischbach’s "Iron Lung," adapted from David Szymanski’s minimalist indie video game, does not arrive from the sanitized, predictable assembly lines of Hollywood. Instead, it emerges from the fiercely independent, self-funded trenches of modern DIY creator culture.

Marriage is a compromise, or so the therapists insist. Jorma Taccone’s "Over Your Dead Body" takes that quaint notion, ties it to a chair, blows its f*cking face off, and set it ablaze. The film operates on the deliciously cynical premise that the only thing capable of rescuing a terminally toxic relationship is the shared, blood-soaked endeavor of slaughtering mutual enemies.

Cinema has long been obsessed with the geometry of revenge, typically mapping it out as a predictable, bloody straight line from grievance to retribution. Panos Cosmatos has absolutely no interest in straight lines. With "Mandy," he has forged a heavy-metal battle-axe of a film, dipped it in liquid LSD, and swung it directly at the collective skull of his audience. To call it a simple revenge thriller is like calling a supernova a bright light. It is a cinematic tour de force that aggressively defies traditional categorization—a phantasmagoric howl of grief and fury that demands not merely to be watched, but to be survived.

Adam Scott has a face built for mild inconvenience. In Parks and Recreation, it was the mild inconvenience of municipal bureaucracy. In Severance, it was the mild inconvenience of corporate dystopia. In "Hokum," it is the mild inconvenience of an ancient, festering Irish curse that wants to unspool his sanity like a cheap ball of yarn. Damian McCarthy, the maestro of subterranean claustrophobia who previously gave us Caveat and Oddity, takes Scott’s trademark tightly wound normalcy and tosses it headfirst into the muddy, blood-stained bogs of a fiercely unforgiving folk horror. The result... a gloriously nasty piece of cinematic cruelty that will make you want to scrub your skin with steel wool.

Rant Inbound...

Space is traditionally cinema’s favorite haunted house—a cold, infinitely expanding vacuum where humanity goes to learn exactly how small and doomed it is. But Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s "Project Hail Mary" takes one look at that terrifying abyss and decides it's actually the perfect setting for a buddy road trip, or rather, a buddy space trip. It's a wildly optimistic, deeply joyful film that suggests the universe may not just be a void waiting to swallow us, but a massive, wondrous laboratory waiting to be understood—preferably with a good friend in the passenger seat.