The Story: An elderly couple take the family RV on one last road trip from Massachusetts to the Hemingway house in Key West. The Lowdown: Aside from predictably masterful performances from Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren, you'll forget this one faster than Sutherland's character forgets his wife's name.

In Brief: The late, great Ken Hanke and I had numerous lengthy and heated debates about the relative merits — or lack thereof, in his opinion — of cult horror parody Student Bodies (1981). This broad farce was the first to lampoon the inherent absurdity of the slasher subgenre when it was still in its infancy, decades before Scream (1996)…

The Story: A man with autism comes out of his shell when he falls in love with a young woman in his autism support group, but their romance is as conflicted and challenging as any other. The Lowdown: A touching and compelling love story rendered all the more laudable for its treatment of adults with autism as human beings…

The Story: A boy living in a dystopian future must win a virtual reality video game to save his escapist nostalgia pit from an evil organization that wants to put ads in it. The Lowdown: 140 minutes of computer-animated pop culture name-dropping masquerading as a movie.

The Story: A sexually precocious teen turns tricks to bail her deadbeat dad out of jail and then murders someone before falling in love with her stepbrother. The Lowdown: A rose by any other name would be more entertaining. Literally, looking at a rose for two hours would be better than watching this film.

In Brief: While it may not be the best film he ever made, Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner (1940) is a prime example of the "Lubitsch Touch." A light, occasionally frivolous romantic comedy that gave James Stewart one of his most iconic early roles, Lubitsch's sense of story and characterization are second to none even if…

The Story: Artist Andy Goldsworthy creates breathtaking art installations from natural materials. The Lowdown: A beautifully meditative look at a captivating artist that examines how time has changed both the man and his work.

The Story: A young woman involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility is convinced that a violent stalker has infiltrated the staff to torment her, but her assertions are disregarded as the ravings of a lunatic. The Lowdown: A Sam Fuller sendup shot on a cellphone, Soderbergh’s latest is a shockingly effective piece of pulp exploitation cinema.

The Story: Though the Kaiju are gone, intrepid Jaeger pilots face a new threat in the form of drones that are not what they appear to be. The Lowdown: Lacking the passion and playful originality of its predecessor, this sequel is a bloated exercise in redundancy.

In Brief: The Thursday Horror Picture Show makes its triumphant return this week at The Black Cloud in West Asheville with a film as polarizing as it is traumatic: Shinya Tsukamoto's seminal classic of Japanese cyberpunk body horror, Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989). Playing something like early Lynch by way of Cronenberg with a dose of Aronofsky on speed,…

In Brief: I'm not one to go in for '90s nostalgia, but thinking back to a time when I didn't have to hear about Donald Trump's illicit affairs with porn stars does have its appeal. The '90s were also a time when I still thought Luc Besson was cool — instead of a talentless, plagiarizing pervert with a thing…

In Brief: A remake of Jean Renoir's La Chienne (1931) — itself based on a play of the same name by Georges de la Fouchardiere, which was based on the book by André Mouezy-Eon — is easily the darkest and most psychologically bleak of Fritz Lang's American output, which, almost by default, places it high…

The Story: Stalin's underlings vie for power in the wake of the dictator's death. The Lowdown: An uncompromisingly dark comedy with a bravura cast that expertly wields farce and satire to elucidate the inadequacies of government in general and totalitarianism in particular.

The Story: A newly elected official in England's National Health Service throws a celebratory party, but revelations from her husband throw the proceedings into chaos. The Lowdown: A sophisticated satire skewering intellectual pomposity through expertly crafted characters portrayed by a top-notch cast.

The Story: An heiress goes on a hunt for her missing father, leading her into a dangerous quest to uncover the lost tomb of a mythical queen. The Lowdown: A thoroughly uninspired and redundant reboot of films based on a defunct video game franchise that serves no ostensible purpose and fails to deliver even the mindless fun its…

In Brief: While I may not find myself among the target demographic for this biopic about the world's worst opera singer, even I found it to be a largely entertaining diversion. It may not be my favorite of director Stephen Frears’ films, but it’s in the top 10 (if not the top five), and is an undeniably…

In Brief: My love for Alejandro Jodorowsky is difficult to overstate, and it all started with El Topo (1970). I'm not alone in that — John Lennon and George Harrison were early advocates of Jodorowsky's surrealist Kabbalistic Western — and there's good reason that it became the first true midnight movie, playing daily for over a year to perpetually…

The Story: Two wealthy teenage girls in a Connecticut suburb reconnect after years apart, but their strange friendship leads to a murder plot. The Lowdown: A pitch-black satire wrapped in the trappings of teen angst and film noir. Have you heard this one? A narcissist and a sociopath walk into a mansion ...