‘Hellraiser’ Review: A Reboot of the Clive Barker Pain-Freak Horror Franchise Is Now the World’s Edgiest Disney Movie

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic If, like me, you consider “All the President’s Men” to be one of the most exciting movies ever made, it’s remarkable to consider that it came out in 1976, just four years after the Watergate break-in. The saga of Richard Nixon’s corruption and downfall had saturated the culture, yet every moment in “All the President’s Men” tingled with discovery. That’s why it’s a film you can watch again and again. When a big-screen journalistic drama gets built around a news story that epic, it needs to give you a version of that feeling. “Spotlight,” the Oscar-winning 2015 drama about The Boston Globe’s unraveling of the child sex abuse scandals within the Catholic Church, wasn’t as great as “All the President’s Men,” yet it, too, was laced with a sense of discovery. It’s there in how the film anatomized not just the horrific behavior of abusive priests but the omertà of the Church.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The “Halloween” series, which comes to an end this weekend (and if you believe that, I have a set of very rusty kitchen knives I’d like to sell you), has always been the least pretentious of horror franchises. A towering killer in a rubber mask pops out of the shadows to slash one victim after the next. Horror doesn’t get much more basic than that. But, of course, the “Halloween” series has always had a pretentious side too — the side that began with Donald Pleasance droning on about eee-vil, and the side that has extended, over the latest trilogy, to the top-heavy handwringing of Laurie Strode’s self-actualized guilt and despair. As for Michael Myers, who started out as a small-town killer, he has been turned, more and more explicitly, into A Force Larger Than Himself. And in “Halloween Ends,” that trend now culminates in a movie where Michael, in a certain way, is barely in the movie; he’s the film’s totem, its mascot, its looming emblem of evil. “Halloween Ends” doesn’t finish off the franchise by being the most scary or fun entry in the series. (It should have been both, but it’s neither.) Instead, it’s the most joylessly metaphorical and convoluted entry.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Nuclear,” his intensely compelling, must-see documentary, Oliver Stone makes the vital and historical case that nuclear power has been the victim of a perception/reality conundrum, one that is now in the process of being overturned. The perception is that nuclear power is dangerous: too dangerous to be an essential component of providing our energy needs. The reality, argues Stone, is that nuclear power is clean, abundant, and safe. “Nuclear” says that the ominous reality of our energy crisis — the looming catastrophe of climate change, the hopeful yet stubbornly incremental growth of renewables like wind and solar — is too urgent for nuclear power not to be an essential component of providing our energy needs.

Marvel Studios’ new “Blade” won’t forge ahead quite yet.

Blink-182 fans, we have some incredible news.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Is That Black Enough for You?!?,” Elvis Mitchell’s highly pleasurable and eye-opening movie-love documentary about the American Black cinema revolution of the late ’60s and ’70s, Billy Dee Williams, now 85 but still spry, tells a funny story about what it was like to play Louis McKay, the dapper love object and would-be savior of Billie Holiday in “Lady Sings the Blues.” The year was 1972, and African-American audiences had rarely (if ever) been given the chance to gawk at a movie star of color who was not just this sexy but this showcased for his sexiness. Louis was like Clark Gable with a dash of Marvin Gaye; when he was on that promenade stairway, Williams says that he just about fell in love with himself. That’s how unprecedented the whole thing was. The actor recalls how the lighting was fussed over (we see a shot in which Louis appears bathed in an old-movie glow), and how unreal that was to him on the set. At the time, Black actors didn’t get lighting like that. But Black audiences drank it in with a better-late-than-never swoon, even as they knew that this was a representation they’d been denied for more than half a century.

The 1980s was a great decade for horror, with classics like “The Shining,” “The Fly,” and two “Evil Dead” movies. Effects were largely practical (not computer-generated) and genre giants Wes Craven, John Carpenter, Sam Raimi and David Cronenberg were making some of their most iconic movies ever.

X” and “The Black Phone” with Ethan Hawke — which are both set in the ’70s — are now on streaming, as is David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future” and Rob Zombie’s take on classic ’60s sitcom “The Munsters.”And you may have missed these foreign films: “The Innocents,” a Norwegian movie about children who misuse their supernatural powers; Austria’s “Luzifer,” which earned lead Franz Rogowski a Best Actor award at Fantastic Fest; Dutch folk horror film “Moloch;” “The Sadness,” an extreme body horror/zombie movie from Taiwan; “Saloum” from Senegal, which The Guardian called “slick gangster horror in wild west Africa;” and “Speak No Evil,” in which a get-together with a couple from Denmark and one from the Netherlands goes horribly wrong. Get in the Halloween spirit with movies about witches, ghosts, zombies, vampires, demons and the scariest monsters of all: Other people.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The movie format where a character beloved by kids becomes a CGI creature, who is then plugged into a live-action universe, is one of the most casually technically astonishing of all popcorn genres — and, as often as not, one of the most stunted. It almost doesn’t matter if the hero is Garfield or Stuart Little, Alvin and the Chipmunks or Sonic the Hedgehog: The way this genre has descended from the noisy bravura of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” the actors tend to be reduced to one-note stooges who get stuck in too many green-screen reaction shots, whereas the critter at the center — the animated star — is, almost inevitably, a preening chatterbox who wears out his welcome by pelting the live-action players, and the audience, with too many bad punchlines.

Zack Sharf Halloween is upon us, which means it’s perfect timing for Ti West’s “X” and David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future,” two of the best new horror movies of the year, to hit streaming platforms. But that’s not all this scary season.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Hot Take: The Depp/Heard Trial” sounds like the tawdriest of TV-movies, with any vestige of shame left on the cutting-room floor. It definitely is that, yet it’s worth noting that this exact sort thing has been around for decades. It just didn’t used to come off the assembly line quite so quickly. In the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, the landscape was littered with made-for-TV movies that jumped on tabloid-ready stories — The Jacksons! Jim Jones! The Menendez brothers! The Beverly Hills madam! The rape of Richard Beck! — and squeezed out whatever juice was left in them. “Hot Take” isn’t much different. It feeds on our collective desire, which is apparently limitless, to see adequate-but-not-never-good-enough actors acting out the infamous scenes we’ve read or heard about, bringing those squalid episodes to life. Except that the whole problem with this form is that the dramatized version rarely ends up looking half as real as what was in our imaginations.

on Hulu, as the streaming service is adding a ton of horror-themed content this month. But not to worry, there’s plenty of other non-spooky new movies and shows to watch too.In the horror realm, director David Bruckner’s new (and well-received) take on “Hellraiser” arrives on Oct.

New music from Neil Young is almost here.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “The Munsters,” the director Rob Zombie makes a game attempt to pass off his amateurishness as attitude. It’s like watching a Tim Burton film with the cheekiness turned up to 11 and the film technique dialed down to 2. Yet “The Munsters,” the family-of-ghouls ’60s sitcom that Zombie is adapting, was such a ticky-tacky piece of gothic bat-house surrealism that the movie, broad and slovenly as it is, works more than it doesn’t. The film is a lot like its hero, Herman Munster: benignly dim-witted, Day-Glo in color, top-heavy with tomfoolery, lumbering in one direction and then the next, always cracking itself up in an innocently aggressive monster-mash way. “The Munsters” debuted in 1964, in the middle of the age of theater-of-the-absurd American sitcoms, yet the show, if anything, was less corny, less obvious, and lighter on its feet than this overstuffed update/reboot, with its Famous Monsters of Filmland cameos and contempo catch phrases. Instead of taking all his cues from the show, Zombie, who wrote the script (you can feel his joy in giving Herman the groan-worthy vaudeville one-liners he delivers as if they were gems), has dreamed up the Munsters’ origin story. (As if anyone was asking for that.) It’s all about how Lily (Sheri Moon Zombie), a maiden vampire with two-tone hair and an undead glow, living with her vampire dad The Count (Daniel Roebuck) in a Transylvania castle of psychedelic chintz, recovers from her life of bad dates with bad monsters — we see one with Orlock, the rat-man bloodsucker of “Nosferatu,” played by Richard Brake as the cuddliest of creeps.

Leslie Grace is sharing an unreleased song that she listened to while filming the now-canceled Batgirl movie. The singer and actor used the tune as a backdrop to the behind-the-scenes footage of the scrapped DC film she had previously shared on TikTok.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Smile” is a horror film that sets up nearly everything — its highly effective creep factor, its well-executed if familiar shock tactics, its interlaced theme of trauma and suicide — before the opening credits. In an emergency psych ward, Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), a diligent and devoted therapist, is speaking to a woman who sounds like her soul went to hell and never made it back. Her name is Laura (Caitlin Stasey), and she describes, in tones that remain rational despite her tremulous panic, the visions she’s been seeing that no one else can. She sees faces — or, rather, a spirit, a something, that reveals itself in people’s faces. She can feel it lurking; the spirit’s signature is a face that will stare back at her with an evil smile, a scary grin of the damned. Describing all this, Laura becomes so distraught that she starts to convulse. Then the doctor turns around, seeing a smashed flowerpot on the floor, and Laura has disappeared. But no! She’s there, with a pottery shard in hand. And now she’s the one smiling, as she digs the shard into her neck and scrapes it along, slitting her throat in blood-gushing slow motion. Put on a happy face!

Kelly Ripa may be known for her bubbly television personality and years spent in front of crowds and cameras. Now, though, in her new book, she opens up about the anxiety that lies beneath. «I have a severe case of social anxiety disorder, and I tend to say awkward or inappropriate things when under duress,» Ripa admits in her new book,. «People think that because I’m an extrovert on television I am one in real life.