MaitlandOnMovies (Substack)

Maitland McDonagh MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) 6 days ago [A] vengeance thriller ... with dark psychological undertones. It’s also exceedingly graphic ... a comic-book-based movie whose focus is on horror, not heroics, and once the bad stuff starts rolling it remains horrific right up to its final shot. Go to Full Review Clayface (2026) 75% - -

Maitland McDonagh MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Oct 15, 2026 'Crawlers' doesn’t break new ground or showcase any particularly breakout talent, but it’s a craftsmanlike, highly efficient 81 minutes with logical beats, a good camera eye ... and an impressive combination of ... real and animatronic spiders plus CGI. Go to Full Review Crawlers (2026) 59% - -

Maitland McDonagh MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Oct 8, 2026 A self-described "rock & roll fairytale" ... it has the tantalizing quality of fragments from a longer and better-structured movie but repeatedly substitutes atmosphere and gratuitous weirdness for dramatic development. Go to Full Review Magick Mtn. (2026) - - - -

Maitland McDonagh MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Oct 8, 2026 [G]ore-soaked nihilism steeped in cinematic iconography, with balletic microcuts during action sequences and degrees of trauma worn on its sleeve like an airline pilot’s rank stripes. [review of 2026 Blu-ray/VOD reissue of 2009 film] Go to Full Review The Sky Has Fallen (2009) - - - -

Maitland McDonagh MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Oct 1, 2026 [R]ather than succumbing to the predictable rhythms of your typical jungle-safari nightmare, the narrative consistently subverts adventure-movie tropes — you’ll know them when you see them. Go to Full Review Beware Boiúna (2026) 58% - -

Maitland McDonagh MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Sep 24, 2026 Shot with crystalline beauty by Patrick Ouziel in an impressive feature debut after a career of commercials and a slew of shorts, 'Never After Dark' is elegantly disturbing, rooted in the legacy of trauma. Go to Full Review Never After Dark (2026) 98% - -

Maitland McDonagh MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Sep 17, 2026 Satisfyingly squishy body-horror.... Transplanting the foundational anxieties of the series into an original milieu, the film captures the game’s dread-inflected atmosphere of survival horror far better than any literal, slavishly devoted adaptation would Go to Full Review Resident Evil (2026) 96% - -

Maitland McDonagh MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Sep 10, 2026 [L]ess interested in explaining its supernatural machinery than in watching ordinary social bonds deform under extraordinary pressure[, i]ts strongest effects come not from spectacle but from watching relationships ... turn frighteningly unstable. Go to Full Review Goody Goody (2026) 45% - -

Maitland McDonagh MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Sep 3, 2026 From its practically campy first act to its truly horrifying final one, 'Ever After' ... is by no means top-tier storytelling, but it owns its eccentricities and excesses and ultimately earns its stylish and seriously horrific climactic scene. Go to Full Review Ever After (2026) - - - -

Maitland McDonagh MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Aug 27, 2026 Holy sh!t. Positing a Barney the Dinosaur-like big orange unicorn that laughs and plays with kids and teaches them lessons about friendship, teamwork and doing whatever he says or suffering the lethal consequences, this is...a powerfully demented original Go to Full Review Buddy (2026) 88% - -

Maitland McDonagh MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Aug 24, 2026 It’s all horrific enough ... and the imagery is both expectedly weird and often suitably gross. Yet ... this one still somehow felt like nothing new. The jump scares were effective but ordinary and the proceedings seemed more-or-less generic to me. Go to Full Review Insidious: Out of the Further (2026) 58% - -

Maitland McDonagh MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Aug 21, 2026 [S]ubverts the American road movie’s traditional promise of freedom. Whereas the highway in films usually suggests escape, self-invention or at least the possibility of elsewhere-ness, [this] offers ... a riposte to the mythology of American mobility. Go to Full Review It Ends (2025) 93% - -

Maitland McDonagh MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Aug 13, 2026 Bodell turns a cramped, weatherbeaten camper into a cornucopia of claustrophobia, delivering a gritty thriller driven, if you will, by a well-developed sense of growing dread. Go to Full Review Hellcat (2025) 89% - -

Maitland McDonagh MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Aug 6, 2026 Roth promised to surpass the excesses of 'Hostel' and 'The Green Inferno,' and in sheer volume of blood and outrageous kills, he arguably succeeds. Yet he also substitutes over-the-top escalation for psychological dread or emotional investment. Go to Full Review Ice Cream Man (2026) 25% - -

Maitland McDonagh MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jul 30, 2026 Thanks to committed performances from Onsager, Tidball and Mahrie, along with Pico’s eye for intimate horror, it’s a thoughtful if imperfect addition to a long tradition of cautionary tales about the price of staying young. Go to Full Review The Withering (2026) - - - -

Maitland McDonagh MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jul 23, 2026 A brilliant marriage of traditional policiers and seductive nightmare, painted in shades of ’80s, 'Manhunter' looked amazing four decades ago and looks even more amazing now [in the 4K 40th-anniversary 'Manhunter: The Final Cut']. Go to Full Review Manhunter (1986) 82% 78%

Maitland McDonagh MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jul 10, 2026 ...a brutal horror film whose emotional ambitions occasionally buckle beneath its appetite for gore, but whose technical craftsmanship is difficult to deny. Go to Full Review Evil Dead Burn (2026) 70% - -

Maitland McDonagh MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jul 2, 2026 [Its] take on what constitutes what’s terrifying in this life relies less on jump scares and gore than a pervasive aura of psychological damage.... It’s not everyone’s idea of what constitutes a good time at a scary movie. But it is genuinely unsettling. Go to Full Review Lockbox (2026) 26% - -

Maitland McDonagh MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jun 18, 2026 'Hungry' succeeds as a lean creature-feature proud of its B-movie heritage, and a killer hippo is unusual enough to feel fresh in a subgenre crowded with sharks, spiders and at least one chimpanzee. I appreciate Nunn favoring practical effects... Go to Full Review Hungry (2026) 54% - -

Maitland McDonagh MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jun 11, 2026 Few debut features arrive with the confidence and clarity of purpose [of this] survival-horror film.... [A] bloody, emotionally charged thriller by a writer-director who understands the complexities of female friendship as well as how to stage terror. Go to Full Review Find Your Friends (2025) 49% - -