Overview: The evil Empire has fallen, and Imperial warlords remain scattered throughout the galaxy. As the fledgling New Republic works to protect everything the Rebellion fought for, they have enlisted the help of legendary Mandalorian bounty hunter Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and his young apprentice Grogu.

Verdict: Yes, you are safe to get up and walk out after the opening sequence of Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu. Just drill whatever commemorative popcorn carton you just spent $50 on into the ground; grab your Grogu doll; blast the screen with two middle fingers; and jet!

The best stuff in the movie happens in those few minutes; then the film becomes a monotonous streak of Mando (Pedro Pascal) fighting a variety of creatures, along with many shots of Grogu (Baby Yoda!) eating. Lots and lots of shots of him eating.

Overview: A few weeks into their van life adventure, a young couple witnesses an accident that leaves the driver dead. Soon, they’re being pursued by a demonic stalker who’s impossible to outrun and follows them wherever they go.

Verdict: When the trailer for this movie dropped it was immediately dubbed the scariest film of the year by those who had viewed it and the internet was abuzz with analysis of the clip. Whilst I appreciate trailers can be misleading, thanks to the initial reactions and as a horror fan, I was really looking forward to this. It seemed to utilize jump scares and a lot of practical effects which I love.

Director André Øvredal also has good form for creating decent horrors having previously helmed movies such as 2016’s The Autopsy of Jane Doe and 2023’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter. It also features Oscar winner Melissa Leo, who is a terrific actress. The signs were good.

The premise is a simple one. A young couple, played by Jacob Scipio and Lou Llobell, pack up their apartment to embrace van life. If you’re not familiar with this concept it basically involves living in a van which has been converted into a micro home. That alone is a horrifying idea for me - but each to their own!

At first, van life is everything they hoped it would be, filled with nonstop adventures and a supportive community. But there are rules to living on the road, rules that have been passed down from generation to generation from the darkest backroads of American highways. And when Maddie convinces Tyler to stop and help a car in distress, they accidentally break the most sacred rule of the road: never stop, especially far away from civilization, because you never know what might climb aboard when you’re not looking.

Overview: From New Line Cinema comes the latest high-stakes installment in the blockbuster video game franchise in all its brutal glory, Mortal Kombat II. This time, the fan favorite champions - now joined by Johnny Cage himself - are pitted against one another in the ultimate, no-holds barred, gory battle to defeat the dark rule of Shao Kahn that threatens the very existence of the Earthrealm and its defenders.

Verdict: Once the runt of movie genres, video game movies are in vogue after the success of the Minecraft, Sonic, and Mario Bros franchises. As such, 2021’s alright-I-guess adaptation of Mortal Kombat hopes to ride that wave of popularity with a sequel, starring The Boys’ Karl Urban.

He plays Johnny Cage, a faded action star who is unwittingly selected as Earth’s new champion in Mortal Kombat, a tournament to defend Earth from the evil clutches of the Outworld dimension.

Feeling like a soft reboot, not least because the characters from the original movie are treated almost like a convenience, this follow-up eschews the sincerity of its predecessor in favor of something bloodier, and funnier. Most of the laughs come from Urban, playing a man saving the world with sheer bluster and action hero catchphrases, making the movie a lot more self-aware, and all the more enjoyable.

Overview: When novelist Ohm Bauman retreats to a remote inn to scatter his parents’ ashes, he’s consumed by tales of a witch that haunts the honeymoon suite. Soon, disturbing visions and a shocking disappearance force him to confront dark corners of his past.

Verdict: For those of you already familiar with Damian McCarthy’s work, the Irish filmmaker has spent the past few years turning cramped Irish spaces into elaborate, nerve-racking machines for dread. His 2020 debut, Caveat, trapped us inside a decaying rural house with a chained protagonist and a grotesque toy rabbit, while 2024’s Oddity transformed an isolated farmhouse into a relay system for jump scares built from negative space and the sound of somebody knocking at the wrong moment. His latest, Hokum, pushes that approach into a larger setting without sacrificing the intimate unpleasantness that makes his work so effective.

The film takes place almost entirely inside the Bilberry Woods Hotel, a fading property buried in the Irish countryside where the final few guests arrive for a Halloween celebration. At the same time, staff members quietly prepare to shut the building down for winter. Into this atmosphere walks Ohm Bauman, played by Adam Scott, an American novelist carrying two urns containing his parents’ ashes and a personality abrasive enough to make even the resident ghouls feel hospitable.

McCarthy introduces Ohm through his work. The opening sequence shows him writing the conclusion to a historical adventure novel about a conquistador stranded in the desert with a dying child, and the scene initially appears disconnected from the main story until the camera pulls back to reveal that the entire episode exists inside Ohm’s manuscript.

This intro establishes the emotional logic driving the film. Ohm writes stories where people wander toward death because he has spent most of his adult life emotionally entombed inside the loss of his parents, who died shortly after honeymooning at the same Irish hotel he now visits. McCarthy avoids turning this into a tidy psychological diagnosis and attempts to reveal the damage through behavior — Ohm humiliates a bellhop named Alby by heating a spoon over an open flame and pressing it against the young man’s hand after Alby asks him to read an aspiring manuscript.

That ugliness becomes central to Scott’s performance. Hokum strips away the comic cushioning that often softens his cynicism, especially in his recent Severance escapades. Scott keeps Ohm emotionally rigid even as the character begins to unravel inside the hotel’s sealed honeymoon suite, and the refusal to chase sympathy lends the film a sourness that works in its favor. When Ohm eventually risks himself to search for the hotel bartender Fiona, the motivation grows from guilt and loneliness over his botched suicide attempt. Fiona disappears after warning him about the suite’s resident witch, a local legend the hotel staff accepts with weary practicality, and her absence pushes Ohm deeper into the building’s sinister secrets.

Cinematographer Colm Hogan lights the hotel with weak lamps, muddy greens, and heavy shadows that preserve spatial clarity even when characters crawl through near-total darkness. Production designer Til Frohlich fills the honeymoon suite with damp wallpaper, antique furniture, and cramped architectural dead ends that make it feel physically hostile before anything malicious even appears. McCarthy then uses sound with vicious precision, as ringing bells ring, creaking floorboards, and a mutated, uncanny-valley children’s TV program begin flooding the ominous silence.

The film loses some momentum once McCarthy begins unpacking the mystery behind Fiona’s disappearance and the crimes attached to the hotel’s past. Several supporting characters remain thinly drawn, particularly the hotel management, and the screenplay occasionally mistakes withholding information for complexity. The final stretch also leans too heavily on explanatory reveals and heightened confrontations, with the climactic encounter involving the witch pushing the film toward bluntness when the earlier sections had earned their power through suggestion alone.

Overview: After a therapist’s patient disappears into a dimension beyond reality, she must venture into the unknown to save him.

Verdict: It doesn’t take a genius to understand why, in a world beset upon by capitalism and existential unease, narratives of urban liminal spaces have taken the internet by storm. Online communities are full of collective creepypasta or viral galleries of urban exploration, priming the pump for some visionary young filmmaker to come along and cash in onscreen. And while the jury might still be out on director Kane Parsons being a visionary, the media surrounding his debut feature Backrooms certainly confirms that he’s young – and about to cash in.

But is Backrooms the kind of generational shift reserved for titles like The Blair Witch Project? Or is Parsons stuffing two pounds of substance into a ten-pound bag? While there’s a lot to like about his liminal horror debut, ultimately, Backrooms is an exercise in diminishing returns – not unlike the eerie spaces he helped craft onscreen.

Even since his wife left him, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is in search of his reason for being. It’s not his furniture store; despite repeated attempts to promote his closeout sales to the broader San Jose community, Clark is left in an enormous warehouse with plenty of inventory and not a customer to show for it. So when Clark tries to investigate the source of a broken fuse box, he is shocked to find himself in a seemingly infinite office building located beneath his store.

At first, Clark is skeptical. But the more he explores (and maps) the boundaries of the back rooms, the more he comes to believe it is a twisted variation on our real-world buildings. This is also what he tries to explain to Dr. Kline (Renate Reinsve), the pseudo-celebrity therapist who guides him through his own divorce. When Dr. Kline decides to check on Clark’s delusions for herself, she soon comes to realize that his frantic stories of enormous rooms and melted furniture are nowhere as fantastical as they seem.

You don’t have to look very hard to see the big ideas that Parsons and screenwriter Will Soodik have in mind for Clark. When confronted with a funhouse mirror version of his own life, Clark chooses the comfort of artifice and the grotesque rather than change (as the saying goes, men would rather explore unknown time-space than go to therapy). Thematically, that’s red meat for anyone who feels like we live in an alienated world. But as Clark himself says, the devil is in the details, and Parsons seems uncertain of how to let those big ideas really sink in. Ejiofor, one of the great actors of his generation, is left to swing wildly between fear and rage with nothing more than cursory gestures towards an inner life.

The same can be said for Dr. Kline, whose own trauma – a childhood spent trapped in the shadow of an agoraphobic mother – is also meant to color the connection between space and memory. Reinsve is never given enough emotional scaffolding to create something narratively load-bearing. She wanders through her life, vaguely unsettled, and takes it upon herself to rescue Clark without the film ever really developing their relationship. When the film eventually trades in its brand of urban exploration for indie horror game mechanics, Reinsve proves herself a kind of capable, cosmic final girl, but by then the movie has revealed its cards – and shown us that most of the ones we were counting on are blank.

How much mileage can you squeeze out of a film’s staging? That’s the good news: when your sets are this good, you can skate along a lot longer than you might think. Parsons may be the one getting the industry writeups, but the true breakout star of Backrooms has to be production designer Danny Vermette, who blends faded ‘80s office space with Cubist absurdity. The film lives and dies by the slow rippling of stylization found on the other side, where rooms and characters become more abstracted the farther removed we are from the real world. It’s not enough to make us care about the characters, but Backrooms does evoke experiential set design from productions like Meow Wolf or Sleep No More. That’s undeniably cool.

Still. One can’t help but wish Parsons had been willing to embrace his film’s own untapped potential. No 20-year-old director would look down their nose at a Christopher Nolan comparison, but Backrooms feels like a halfhearted attempt at Lynchian cinema in much the same way that Nolan’s Inception traded the absurdity of dreams for superhero-adjacent game mechanics. No matter how good your set might be, you can only showcase an array of images so often before your audience gets immune to their impact. Without the beating heart of a weirdo to drive it, the twisted milieu of Backrooms eventually gives way to diminishing returns.