Between 2024’s Lisa Frankenstein and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s upcoming The Bride!, new iterations of the stitched-together and woefully misunderstood monster drop on a damn-near annual cycle. Lately, these takes have been far-removed from Mary Shelley’s classic novel. So much so, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein — while still highly anticipated by the filmmaker’s faithful — almost seems passé and uninspired on its surface. At the same time, the director’s work is rarely skin-deep. And similar to his last adaptation, 2022’s Pinocchio (the good one, without Tom Hanks), del Toro wraps his iconic aesthetic around an emotional and accessible narrative heart.

After Capt. Anderson (Lars Mikkelsen, Netflix’s House of Cards), his crew and his ship get stuck in the North Pole, they rescue a dying Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac, Ex Machina). Unfortunately, saving Victor incurs the wrath of his creature (Jacob Elordi, Saltburn), who quickly turns a third of the crew into ragdolls and human accordions. After temporarily subduing his monster, Victor recounts his history, including his tumultuous relationship with his brother’s fiancée, Elizabeth (Mia Goth, MaXXXine). Before he can wrap up his memoir, however, the creature returns with a forceful request: to tell his own story.

Frankenstein is a straighter adaptation than Pinocchio, though both necromancy-laden films feel tonally and thematically inseparable. The former notably lands on a less bleak note than its source material without significantly changing Shelley’s plot. Still, it takes some liberties to modernize with mixed results. On the plus side, Elizabeth has exponentially more agency and purpose, who’s made even more vibrant by Goth’s performance.

And despite its two-and-a-half-hour runtime, the film’s pacing is far brisker than a mostly faithful Frankenstein adaptation has any right to be. That said, the film omits a particularly famous act that — while it ultimately makes sense — is nonetheless missed given everything else del Toro includes. Finally, the forced creature fight scenes feel at odds with the film’s celebration of life, almost like they were jammed in because someone felt the film was too boring without some Marvel-esque violence.

Overtly, this may be the most del Toro of the director’s filmography. It’s not for everyone, but for those who vibe with his craft, Frankenstein feels like the film he was born to make. It has some superficial flourishes, like the flaming angel of death that sort of looks like an unused asset from a Hellboy flick, but most of his visual storytelling lands poetically. As far as the cinematography is concerned, it’s a little more muddled. For the most part, the ample closeups lend themselves to the film’s overall intimacy. Conversely, only a few shots of Victor’s castle and Anderson’s ship convey the sprawling epic that the film — at least at times — tries to be.

Frankenstein, like the monstrosity it revolves around, isn’t perfect. But deep down, it delivers a message that we desperate need: We try so hard to beat death, we unintentionally forget to champion life. In a time where catastrophic violence can seem imminent, living might be the greatest act of defiance. —Daniel Bokemper

One broken vial of “experimental yeast” at the BioTek Agronomics laboratory triggers a biohazard alarm and subsequent full facility lockdown. After security officer Joanie (Kathleen Quinlan, 1997’s Breakdown) seals the employees — herself included — inside to prevent a public outbreak, the local yokels try to bust their way in from the outside, despite the infection bearing a fatality rate of 80%.

Science vs. ignorance: Good thing Warning Sign is purely a work of speculative fiction that in no way can occur in today’s world.

A technician played by Police Academy foil G.W. Bailey is irate at Joanie for enacting protocol. Her sheriff husband (Sam Waterston, Serial Mom) is peeved their planned Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits dinner will go cold. Choppering into town like a boss is Yaphet Kotto (Alien) as a major for the U.S. Accident Containment Team, ready to take control because he knows the place’s secrets.

The lone feature directed by Hal Barwood, who wrote the film with fellow Dragonslayer scribe Matthew Robbins, Warning Sign begins as an out-and-out virus thriller, then flirts with approximating a zombie movie before settling into siege-picture territory for the finale. That schizophrenic nature all but halts initial momentum and harms any chance of staying power. The conclusion offers one element above average: Waterston aggressively shooting his way through the throng — with an inoculation gun.

Although middle-age Waterston isn’t as effective onscreen as today’s twilight-time Waterston, his supporting cast is a character actor’s dream, with meaty turns from the likes of Jeffrey DeMunn (The Mist), Scott Paulin (1990’s Captain America) and Richard Dysart (1982’s The Thing), who’s never had this much leeway to cut loose.

Warning Sign isn’t so rote to bear its own (other than maybe “CONTAINS MUCH WELDING”), but with as much talent involved, it should have been better. At least three shots are hilarious, which assuredly is not what Barwood and Robbins were going for. Make it a Blockbuster night by pairing it with Alan Rudolph’s loftier-minded, equally iffy and ultimately more bonkers Endangered Species. —Rod Lott

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Following The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse and The Return of Dr. Mabuse, Gert Fröbe’s Inspector Lohmann is nowhere to be found, presumably off to grab a hoagie or four. Also nowhere to be found: Dr. Mabuse! Well, if he can get his German grabbers on the invisibility machine invented by the aptly named Professor Erasmus (Rudolf Fernau, The Mad Executioners), that is.

Whereas Mabuse (the returning Wolfgang Preiss) desires the doohickey for his usual world-domination agenda, the academic utilizes it to spy on the stage actress he’s obsessed with (Karin Dor, The Bellboy and the Playgirls) incognito. This gives us several amusing shots of hovering binoculars from a box seat at the opera … although he could just walk onstage, being unseeable and all.

The third film of producer Artur Brauner’s six-flicks revival of the German supervillain, The Invisible Dr. Mabuse largely plays out at the trapdoor-laden theater, where returning FBI agent Joe Como (Lex Barker) joins commissioner (Siegfried Lowitz, The Sinister Monk) investigates a poison-gas murder committed by Bobo the Clown (Werner Peters, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) and eventually learns of Mabuse’s dastardly scheme, aka Operation X.

And X marks the entertainment. From multiple drops of a guillotine to someone’s face melting like Velveeta, director Harald Reinl (Chariots of the Gods) throws a ton at the screen. Lucidity may not result, but the pulp-science antics make for a fun break in the series — something of a one-off. —Rod Lott

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Between the unsettling visions of the great beyond and an unwavering devotion to depicting a dark, sad reality, The Sacred Spirit rides the line between unexplained phenomena and drastic sobriety. And not in the way you might think.

You see, Spirit is about the innocent layers of a fractured soul. Eventually, it gets to a rotten core that slashes and burns everything around. It’s a reverse ugly-duckling scenario that still shakes me after the credits rolled.

José (Nacho Fernández) is a simple guy who works at a small-time tapas bar with quirky regulars and personable clientele. After closing, he’s part of a UFO cult that believes spacemen are coming back — and very soon. While the community wrestles with finding a missing girl — José’s niece, mind you — he comes off like a somewhat dopey, but harmless crackpot.

Meanwhile, lamenting the loss of their beloved leader, the cult members trek to his grave on the town outskirts to pay their respects. There, José drops a child’s pink-bunny backpack into the river. While the police investigate, José takes his other niece, the missing girl’s twin, to an “astral plane” discussion, telling her stories about a UFO coming to take them away that evening to live in paradise.

It doesn’t happen, but what does is far worse.

At first, Spirit is about crazy UFO culture and their followers’ belief systems. But as the New Age group Sacred Spirit’s “Yeha-Noha” plays over the end credits, it’s methodically razed the whole area to ash in beauty and shame, purification and purification.

Chema García Ibarra’s bait-and-switch direction is close to the crazed realism depicted in Jose’s UFO books, with the Sphinx and other Egypt-centric items he imagines in his life. If you go into this wanting a flying saucer debate among the backroom crazies, sorry, it’s not here. The Sacred Spirit is a calm, almost mumblecore depiction of analog beliefs in a broken world. —Louis Fowler

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As played by Christopher Walken in the film Communion, with nary a Jesus cracker in sight, Whitley Strieber tries to write the Great American Novel. Because Strieber is a real-life author of The Wolfen and The Hunger, we know he won’t. But he does write the book Communion, the work of nonfiction — 😉 😉 — that ultimately will take his career to the stars.

Why? The answer’s in the butt, Bob. No Walken film is more Walken, for reasons that shall become apparent.

At a post-Christmas weekend visit to the family cabin from their NYC apartment, Whitley endures a sweaty nightmare of being visited by gray-skinned, big-eyed aliens from outer space. After returning home, his wife (Lindsay Crouse, The Arrival) notices he’s just not himself anymore — and for good reason, which surfaces under hypnosis by Misery’s Frances Sternhagen: That was no dream. And following that logic, that means the anal probe … gulp!

This causes a fissure in his rectum marriage, which may be for the best, considering the missus has a fashion sense I’d dub “Annie Hall meets Carmen Sandiego.”

The first glimpse we’re afforded of the alien is merely partial — and wholly terrifying. This bodes well for Communion. But as Whitley’s obsessions and breakdowns increasingly unhinge him from reality, Walken goes full Walken, and so does the movie! From the director’s chair, Philippe Mora (Howling II and III) approaches lucidity more liberally than his star tackles diction.

I don’t quite know how to convey the odd-as-a-$3-bill nature of Whitley’s experiences on the aliens’ ship. He parties with them in a pilgrim hat. They hang in a steam room. He high-fives an E.T. and then dances. I realize these sound like scenes from a stoner comedy where Seth Rogen might blow aliens’ minds with bong-hit lessons and, in exchange, they infuse his with, like, algebra and shit.

Seriously, these too-close encounters of the WTF kind feel as though Mora and Strieber (who adapted his own bestseller for the screenplay) are just fucking with us to see if we’re willing to swallow. I am not.

In fact, I’d steal Whitley’s ominous threat to public transit riders — “Let me tell you, you folks are in for a big surprise, one very big surprise” — and throw it right back at this maladroit movie, aiming to knock that goddamn pilgrim hat into a galaxy far, far away. That’s more action than the third section gives, and still no Jesus crackers. —Rod Lott

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