Comedy

Littermates (2026)

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Because Littermates comes from one of the producers of the summer’s from-nowhere smash Obsession, it’s being sold as a horror thriller. That’s doing this film an extreme disservice, setting up a switcheroo moviegoers will not take kindly to, because Littermates is, in reality, a dark comedy. And a damned funny one, not to mention one of the year’s most sparkling gems.

On his picture-perfect English countryside estate, the kindly Chester (Oliver Woolf) has taken in two young adults who separately emerge from the forest in shock, so terrified and traumatized they’re unable to speak. (We’d think them feral if not for being well-dressed.) Chester teaches them to communicate again and, because they have no memory, christens them Liam (Joey Bader) and Mel (Kaylee McGregor). He also gives them gas masks and tells them they must stick together, especially when and if they hear warning sirens.

Just what in the Stockholm Syndrome is going on here? With about 12 minutes elapsed, it’s obvious we’re in 10 Cloverfield Lane territory, but funny and with the healing power of Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now.” That ballad arrives via evening karaoke sessions — just one of several rewards Liam and Mel can enjoy by redeeming good-behavior coins Chester calls “nifties.” (Others include trampoline time or a “headphone song before bed.”)

Three’s company for this nuclear family … until three’s a crowd. Liam and Mel bicker like siblings half their actual ages, but she grows more curious about pushing boundaries. The less said, the better, beyond that Littermates boasts a trio of winning performances, each operating on a different register, and contains awfully gorgeous imagery for such a twisted, bleak comedy. Co-directors Scott Tinkham and Michael Woloson, working from Tinkham’s smart script, earn fistfuls of nifties all their own. —Rod Lott

In theaters Friday, Nov. 6.

Horror

Graveyard Disturbance (1987)

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Driving the most airbrushed van in the history of paint, five teenagers go camping in an out-of-the-way cemetery. The grounds feature decrepit buildings, Gothic statues and more fog than John Carpenter’s The Fog and its remake combined. It’s also, as the kids discover upon waking in the middle of the night, home to a tavern, complete with sausages inside and a neon sign for Miller High Life out front.

The tavern keeper (Lino Salemme, Demonia), who has a blinking red eye and ends sentences with overly gregarious belly laughs, tells them if they can survive until dawn in the cursed crypt below, they’ll win a booty of riches. (That’s the strangest twist on the Big Texan’s 72 oz. steak dinner challenge I’ve ever heard.) Because Graveyard Disturbance otherwise would be a short subject, the teens accept.

Roaming the catacombs from room to tomb, they run across rats, spiders, hanging vampires, zombies with herpes sores, an oversized eyeball with optic nerve still attached, maggot-strewn screws and diarrhea-streaked walls. These sets are the film’s high point, casting an appropriate spooky vibe.

I just wish director Lamberto Bava (Demons) had treated the story seriously instead of an Italian Scooby-Doo. The attempts at humor fail — and hard — killing real potential. Worse, pieces unintended to elicit laughs do, notably when the quintet’s most level-headed member (Lea Martino, Bava’s You’ll Die at Midnight) complains, “I like fun things: candy, Christmas carols, Woody Allen!” That line hasn’t aged well, nor has Graveyard Disturbance as a whole. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Documentary

Manhood (2026)

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As the saying goes, everything’s bigger in Texas. Including the penis, if Dallas-based medspa owner Bill Moore has anything to say about it.

And by “say about,” we mean “inject into.” With an apropos last name, Moore’s invented a way to increase the phallus — not in length, but girth — to more resemble the size and shape of, oh, something aluminum that could be redeemable for a dime in Michigan, Oregon and Connecticut. His innovation also involves a sleeve-and-bungee-cord situation that looks like a reject from the board game Mouse Trap.

In Manhood, we follow Moore on his mission to “man up” insecure men, one dick at a time. This is the second feature documentary Daniel Lombroso has directed, following 2020’s White Noise (which, incidentally, probed a different type of prick: white supremacists). However, Manhood’s guts seem rooted in Lombroso’s 2023 short, You’ll Be Happier, about one woman’s choice to get a Brazilian butt lift despite the surgery’s dangers. 

Needle-delivered phallus fillers amount to a procedure, not a surgery, but can prove hazardous nonetheless. An OnlyFans creator named David learned this the hard way, seeking Moore’s help after another provider’s botched silicone procedure makes David’s unit look like a deformed potato after a domestic violence situation.

Manhood’s other primary patient, Ruben, engenders nine-tenths less sympathy. He’s a father of five who’s struggling to house his children, yet selfishly drops an estimated $20,000 for something his spouse doesn’t appear to want. While you feel for the guy due to his childhood, you also want to knock the vape out of his hands, set fire to his Pokémon T-shirts and tell him to grow up. His wife offhandedly mentions he was fired for beating off in the bathroom.

He’s the type of guy who falls for the manosphere bullshit — dickmaxxing or otherwise — thus depriving his family of their basic needs because he comes first. Meanwhile, Moore poses next to his latest luxury vehicle and, to no one’s surprise, has a framed portrait in the injection room of himself as royalty.

Why people do what they do is an uncrackable conundrum; that’s why God made documentaries, babe. Lombroso’s level of access is so unfettered, Manhood could bear the title You Can See Everything. (And you can, some of it prefaced with a “WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGERY” title card.) That said, Lombroso leaves some threads dangling that I wish he would’ve yanked.

Quibbles aside, the film is never not interesting. It’s lively, offers fleeting moments of poignancy and displays BDE: Big Documentary Energy. —Rod Lott

In theaters Oct. 30.

Horror

The Dentist (1996)

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Corbin Bernsen already had played a periodontic psychopath in 1994’s Appointment for a Killing when he took on the title role of The Dentist. Whereas the earlier film was a thriller made for TV, this slasher pic was built for the playground of VHS and cable, so Bernsen really gets to go for the gusto. And the guts.

A clean freak and control freak in equal measure, Dr. Alan Feinstone loses his goddamn mind after glimpsing his trophy wife (Linda Hoffman, Face/Off) going down on the greasy pool repairman (Michael Stadvec, The Chosen One: Legend of the Raven). At his dental practice with its pink-pastel walls, Dr. F takes his rage out on his patients, from accidentally slicing open a child’s gumline to purposely sexually assaulting a starlet (Christa Sauls, Ghost Rock) while she’s zonked on a nitrous oxide overdose. Her agent is a sweater-over-the-shoulder yuppie played by Mark Ruffalo, who most certainly leaves this off his CV.

The Dentist exists to see Dr. Feinstone exact much tooth and tongue trauma, and each successive checkup gets grislier. By the time he gets an overly zealous IRS agent (Earl Boen, The Terminator) into the chair, the movie finally feels comfortable with becoming the Re-Animator reunion it is for creatives Brian Yuzna, Dennis Paoli and Stuart Gordon. Yet that’s also when it concludes — too little, too soon. They’re capable of better.

At least Bernsen (The Yeti) is fiercely committed to his role, unafraid to do the worst while looking his best. The Dentist 2 followed. Alas, a crossover film with Dr. Giggles did not. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Mystery

A Talent for Murder (2026)

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Right now, theatergoers can see two films concerning a New York publisher’s envoy staying at the home of a venerated novelist to help squeeze a new book out of the situation, which proves unexpectedly hazardous. Naturally, the option that’s terrible, Verity, has made a nine-figure load of dough.

Then there’s A Talent for Murder. Unlike Verity, it’s not an erotic thriller. Unless snails count.

Weapons’ Alden Ehrenreich is the publisher’s rep, Edward Ridgeway. Helen Mirren (Winchester) is the author. And not just any author, but crime-fic legend Patricia Highsmith, she of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley. In 1995, Ridgeway travels to Switzerland with a contract, in hopes of convincing Highsmith to cap her brilliant career with a sixth Ripley novel.

Because his predecessor vanished eerily after visiting Highsmith’s home, Ridgeway knows his mission won’t be a breeze. Her face set on permasour mode, Highsmith proves arrogant to the nth degree and saltier than a dozen bags of Rold Golds. She openly displays a collection of sharp weapons. And her kitchen is loaded with toxins and poisons that seem to coarse through her veins, only to emerge from her mouth as venom — with exquisite diction, mind you. 

You need not be familiar with Highsmith or her work to enjoy what stealthily boils into a beguiling mystery. As she and Ridgeway talk shop, a potential story for the book takes shape, which we see play out on the cobbled streets and in country estates of Italy. In this “movie” within the movie, the jet-set metrosexual Ripley (also Ehrenreich) schemes his way into a fortune by way of wooing a wealthy family’s youngest heir (Olivia Cooke, Ready Player One). Among other actions. As was the case with director Anton Corbijn’s underrated (and equally literate) spy thriller, 2010’s The American, these Italian sequences amount to visual intoxication.

Meanwhile, in the real world of Switzerland (although A Talent for Murder is not based on true events), we suspect Ridgeway is being manipulated by a master. Mirren sure plays Highsmith as a sinister spinster, her dowdiness disguising a mind capable of conjuring the best of worst possible deeds. Ehrenreich ultimately walks away with the film by handling two roles of opposing forces, the Ripley part of which showcases a smile just a few wrinkles shy of Jack Nicholson’s iconic grin of mischief from the 1970s and ’80s.

It’s rare for a modern suspense story to operate several steps ahead of its audience and hold that advantage throughout. The film isn’t a whodunit, but a wholldoit. Wherever it was taking me, I wasn’t quite certain, but all-in for the ride. These days, that’s pure pleasure. —Rod Lott

In theaters Oct. 23.

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