Overview: In this high-stakes suspense thriller, Academy Award® nominee Mark Wahlberg (Actor in a Supporting Role, 2006 -- The Departed) plays a pilot transporting an Air Marshal (Michelle Dockery) accompanying a fugitive (Topher Grace) to trial. As they cross the Alaskan wilderness, tensions soar and trust is tested, as not everyone on board is who they seem.

Verdict: Mel Gibson’s career has been quite remarkable. Coming very young off the success of the original Mad Max worldwide, the actor then went to Hollywood, where he became a movie star, and a respected film director, only to fumble under nasty declarations and political matters that put him on Hollywood’s blacklist.

However, it is undeniable that Gibson is immensely talented, and we expect a lot from him because he has given us greatness before. Sadly, Flight Risk is not the greatness we and he deserve.

From a script point of view, the film delivers quite an interesting and delightful premise that reminds us of Agatha Christie’s mystery thrillers, trying to find who is who and who will do what and when. These types of stories are pretty entertaining, and writers and filmmakers have made a career out of them.

Just look at what Rian Johnson is doing at Netflix with his Knives Out films, and yet, these stories, while fun, need to be well-researched and planned unless you want to make the audience angry.

Nowadays, audiences are very intelligent, media savvy, and can detect and predict many things happening at all times. While being unpredictable is great, it shouldn’t be the end goal of a film or story because even when a story is very predictable, audiences will forgive it or don’t care if it is well executed.

In the case of Flight Risk, the execution falls short for several reasons, including tone, acting, and not being committed enough to be what it should be: a thriller.

The script tries to assign too many things to too many characters, and while it works for some of them, you can definitely see that there are many characters who don’t serve a purpose or are even interesting. This creates the sensation that the film is wasting the audience’s time, and not being committed enough to the genre avoids giving the story the punch it needs to connect with audiences.

Overview: A family moves into a suburban house and becomes convinced they’re not alone. Presence is a slow-burning spectral thriller which reaffirms that Soderbergh plays with form as deftly as he flits between genres.

Verdict: Like when culinary creatives mush two disparate foods together, “horror movie told from the ghost’s point of view” is one of those conceits that could be delish or disgusting. Going in, it was straight-up 50/50 whether the first-person perspective would be a savory delight or a vomit-encouraging platter of custard mixed with beef.

That’s probably something British people already serve in real life, isn’t it? Is that what spotted dick is? Don’t tell me. Well, it turns out that director Steven Soderbergh’s “gimmick” is a tasty treat! It’s just everything else that tastes awful.

To keep the food metaphor going for just another tick, writer David Koepp’s scripts come in two flavors: the original Jurassic Park and Tom Cruise’s The Mummy remake. Much more the latter than the former, the big reveal in Presence caused me to stifle a laugh so hard that something popped inside.

It was a stupendous stifle. Not all his fault though, as multiple wildly awful performances suggest that maybe Soderbergh needed to do a little less “bein’ a spooky ghost behind the camera” and a little more “telling performers to do a better job.”

After her friend tragically died, Chloe (Callina Liang) and her mom, Rebekah (Lucy Liu); dad, Chris (Chris Sullivan); and brother, Tyler (Eddy Maday), move into a house that’s already very much occupied by an invisible resident.

Rebekah is obsessed with her son to a degree where, for at least one scene, you think a ghost is about to see a full-on Oedipal no-no. She’s also doing some unspecified crimes. Chris is worried about Chloe, because he loves his kids evenly like a big weirdo.

Tyler is trying to be cool at school, doing “pranks” that are just acts of cruelty. This is what YouTube and TikTokking hath wrought and taught. Tyler befriends or gets befriended by Ryan (West Mulholland), who very quickly lusts after Chloe.

Their courtship progresses under the watchful eye of our unidentified poltergeist, who soon begins doing poltergeisty business. You know, knocking juice over, tearing posters off of walls, and giving a psychic the family brings in some hardcore heebie jeebies.

The mystery embedded in the film is identifying who the ghost is and what they want. The answer to that is so, so incredibly stupid. It is the kind of stupid where there’s no way it could have come out okay using all the story elements involved.

Making things worse is the fact that virtually everyone but Sullivan is just…off in their delivery. The clever camerawork could have made the haunting feel “real,” but only Sullivan goes for anything near authentic. Everyone else is on a sub-community-theater level, including the normally fantastic Liu.

Soderbergh gets an A for his cinematography work and a D- for his actual direction. Any time he makes another film, it’s an excuse to marvel at his stunning filmography. It’s huge and peppered with so much spectacular stuff that he’s more than earned the right to try stuff like this.

Overview: From Blumhouse and visionary writer-director Leigh Whannell, the creators of the chilling modern monster tale The Invisible Man, comes a terrifying new lupine nightmare: Wolf Man. Golden Globe nominee Christopher Abbott (Poor Things, It Comes at Night) stars as Blake, a San Francisco husband and father, who inherits his remote childhood home in rural Oregon after his own father vanishes and is presumed dead.

With his marriage to his high-powered wife, Charlotte (Emmy winner Julia Garner; Ozark, Inventing Anna), fraying, Blake persuades Charlotte to take a break from the city and visit the property with their young daughter, Ginger (Matlida Firth; Hullraisers, Coma).

Verdict: Odds were good that Leigh Whannell would eventually make a bad movie, but after the horror reboot skills he displayed in The Invisible Man, it didn’t seem like Wolf Man would be his first significant misstep.

Heck, for the first 40some minutes of this Universal Monsters update, practically all signs point to another success.

Featuring gorgeous natural scenery in remote Oregon and transfixing sound design, the introductory 1995 chapter shows Whannell’s gifts with supernatural tension in full effect. As Marine-turned-prepper Grady Lovell (Sam Jaeger, Parenthood) and his son Blake (Zac Chandler) encounter a mysterious creature while out in the woods, terror runs high and visible breath outside a hunting blind expertly conveys an unseen threat.

Suspense remains high as the actions shifts 30 years forward to adult Blake (Christopher Abbott, Poor Things) living in San Francisco with his workaholic journalist wife Charlotte (Julia Garner, Ozark) and their daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth, Disenchanted). Though few insights are offered, it’s clear that their marriage has fractured, and when the long-missing Grady is declared dead and the opportunity arises to spend quality time together at Blake’s childhood home, the family heads north.

Once there, a well-staged, unsettling ride with Grady’s survivalist neighbor Derek (Benedict Hardie, The Invisible Man) goes horribly wrong, forcing the Lovells to scramble for their lives and seek refuge in the house. Inside, it becomes evident that Blake’s wound from the incident has some unusual side effects, yet while the transformation into the titular beast would seemingly herald the film’s most terrifying moments, it instead ushers in a shockingly rapid descent towards ineptitude.

In addition to forgetting how to light a scene, Whannell and his wife/co-writer Corbett Tuck forego their firm grip on the narrative in favor of an arduous chronicling of Blake’s gradual change. Though this overlong stretch includes some creative representations of his suddenly enhanced senses, they’re undermined by puzzling character decisions that stem from Charlotte and Ginger somehow not grasping the severity of Blake’s condition.

Overview: Robert Eggers’ NOSFERATU is a gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman and the terrifying vampire infatuated with her, causing untold horror in its wake.

Verdict: Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu is a mostly faithful remake of FW Murnau’s silent-era classic from 1922. Eggers’s horror drama also pays tribute to Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu The Vampyre (1979) and the source of both movies: Bram Stoker’s classic 1897 novel Dracula.

A consummate stylist, Eggers’s films – The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman – compensate for plotting deficiencies with imaginative cinematography and production design. Nosferatu too has mesmerizing visuals and a haunting mood befitting an occult tale of demonic possession.

Jarin Braschke’s exemplary camerawork creates spectral plays of light and shadow. The visual design, alluring in itself, is a much-needed distraction from the excessive verbalizing and mostly underwhelming performances.

The setting is the German town Wisborg in 1838 (identical to Murnau’s movie). The vampire Nosferatu has been plaguing the nightmares of Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) since her childhood. Ellen’s unholy curiosity about the blood-sucking monster follows her into adulthood.

Ellen is filled with foreboding when her ambitious husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) travels to a faraway castle to finalize a house sale deed for the mysterious Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard). Thomas’s terrifying experiences with Orlok sets into motion a chain of events that actually began years before.

Eggers’s screenplay isn’t freighted with retrospective analysis or metaphorical ideas. Ellen’s anxieties are dismissed as a case of nerves (Sigmund Freud hasn’t been born yet), and that’s that – just as an infestation of rats is not a political allegory.

Rather, Nosferatu delivers pure, old-fashioned horror with droplets of gore and lashings of madness. Eggers directs the film as he might have in the late 1800s, working into his grey-tinted palette the rich atmospherics of early silent cinema. However, Nosferatu is too wedded to its visual schema to include moments that provide relief from the travails of Ellen and Thomas.

Francis Ford Coppola’s brilliant Dracula adaptation from 1992 approached its source material with sexy playfulness about the erotic aspects of the vampire cult. In Nosferatu, Ellen’s funereal pallor and near-dead eyes suggest a fatalism that precludes the element of surprise or even perverse wonderment.

The film is unrelentingly and unitonally grim, with little to distinguish the lives led by Thomas and Ellen before and after they get involved with monstrosity. Ellen’s encounter with Nosferatu in the very first scene is like blurting out something that should have been kept under wraps until the opportune moment.

The waifish, perennially fraught Lily-Rose Depp has the physical appearance but not the emotional vulnerability of a typical nineteenth-century Gothic heroine. The narrative also suffers from a defanged vampire.

As Orlok/Nosferatu, Bill Skarsgard’s heavy breathing and guttural manner are risible, rather than scary. The most convincing performance is from Nicholas Hoult, whose portrayal of sheer terror provides the strongest evidence that a great deal is at stake.