Fans who the original may not love all the changes, but the live-action version reworks enough story to give added quality time to Lilo and Nani instead of merely sticking with Stitch, allowing the humans to literally bring the film’s climactic ending down to Earth. Beats inspired by and/or taken directly from the original film fail to follow through, too often calling attention to themselves. Example: Earth-expert Pleakley mentions rebuilding the mosquito population (wink wink), but the plot points…

Stories that flirt with the supernatural, especially with the best of intentions, make for interesting character studies. Mike Flanagan’s “Midnight Mass,” for example, not only paves his road to hell with good intentions but puts up strip malls and truck stops. In Bring Her Back, the core concept is seeded from the beginning but begins unfocused, building anxiety by first gaslighting the characters and then granting audiences an insider look. By the time the diabolical plan is revealed to all,…

Ensemble slashers like this tend to follow the tropes outlined in The Cabin In the Woods, but this plot eerily follows the bullet points of Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving, which itself was informed by his own fake film trailer made for the Tarantino and Rodriguez Grindhouse double-feature. Similarities aside, this clown has a secret weapon: Katie Douglas. Amazingly watchable and utterly comfortable as our presumed final girl Quinn, she’s already known for playing captives or characters in danger since she was…

“Close these transactions, and your future with this franchise is assured!” (with apologies to Jonathan Harker.) As a late eighteenth-century period piece devolving into a graphic horror film, the drama plays out among the doomed crew between the lines of the novel’s logbook entries, redefining the narrative yet ending up in the same place. To fill in the blanks, the story is sprinkled with theoretical characters who, while not explicitly mentioned, might have existed in the most James Cameron Titanic…