Bone Lake opens with a naked couple running through the woods as they attempt to dodge arrows shot from an unknown pursuer’s crossbow. Movie, you have my attention.

And that’s merely the prologue. The film’s primary lovers are Sage (Maddie Hasson, Malignant) and Diego (Marco Pigossi, Amazon’s Gen V). He’s planning to use their romantic getaway to a lakeside rental home — a mansion, practically — as the pic-perfect opportunity to propose.

Good intentions go sideways with the arrival of a second couple, Cin (Andra Nechita, Bad Teacher) and Will (Alex Roe, Rings), who also have reserved the place. A quick squabble yields a quick compromise: The place is big enough for the foursome — and then some — what with all its extra rooms and a hallway leading to three locked doors.

Starting with Barbarian, this is the fourth movie I’ve seen to use a double-booked abode as a springboard, so something’s in the water culturally. Bone Lake is the first to make it kinky, putting T&A into the BnB. Rather than settle for being your average erotic thriller going through the motions (like up top, from behind, on a car hood, etc.), the screenplay by Suicide Blonde’s Joshua Friedlander chooses to lean harder into gamesmanship than genitalia. With creativity, director Mercedes Bryce Morgan (Spoonful of Sugar) deftly choreographs the horror-adjacent tale’s balance of dark comedy, sexual politics and fireplace implements.

I’d argue that its “twist” is purposely transparent, given how the film is driven more by characterization than plot. For example, Diego is set up as a wannabe novelist who may lack the talent to fulfill his dream, with Sage not only winning the bread, but feeling her boyfriend plays things too safely, both on the page and in their relationship.

But don’t let that make Bone Lake sound like therapy homework. Rest assured, it kicks out the jam of The Exploited’s “Sex & Violence” for good reason — and twice! All four leads have a bloody good time to ensure you do as well. It doesn’t break ground, but it waters it enough to getcha wet. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Within minutes of Die My Love, Jennifer Lawrence is clutching a butcher knife as she crawls through the grass, stopping only to give in to an urge to masturbate under the golden sun. So if you didn’t believe it before, let’s make it really, really official: Those Hunger Games have ended for good.

Strike that — they’ve ended for the great, because this film is a vehicle for Lawrence’s finest performance to date, besting even her Winter’s Bone breakthrough. She’s fantastic. Her role as Grace, a young mother in the throes of postpartum depression, frees her as an actress; she isn’t afraid to be unlikable, to shed her inhibitions, to cry without knowing why, to take extremely dangerous actions, and more.

As the mother (Sissy Spacek, 1976’s Carrie) of her baby daddy (Robert Pattinson, The Batman) tells her, “Everybody goes a little loopy the first year.” But in the hands of director and co-writer Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin), Grace’s loopiness is anything but small, much less something carrying a 12-month expiration date.

Just as Ramsay crafted You Were Never Really Here into an ice-cold revenger beyond what one would expect from Joaquin Phoenix hammering bad people, she’s stripped this follow-up project of any disease-of-the-week trappings any surface-level synopsis might imply. (FWIW, she’s also gutted the source novel’s comma from the title.)

Die My Love is an outlandish, unconventional psycho thriller that doesn’t just flirt with horror, but fucks it. Quite apropos for the exceedingly horny nature of its main characters, colors cast in otherworldly shades, comedy darker than the most bitter chocolate, a timeline twisted into knots, and visions of the abstract that would do David Lynch proud, perhaps most notably a drop of breast milk dissolving into the night sky. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

For his wealthy parents’ silver wedding anniversary shindig, the underachieving Josh (Dylan O’Brien, Saturday Night) brings his ambitious new girlfriend, Liz (Phoebe Dynevor, 2023’s Fair Play). This would be extra cause for celebration, if not for Liz’s past as a rather adversarial student of Josh’s college-professor mom, Ellen (Diane Lane, Untraceable).

Ellen relays the whole story to her husband (Kyle Chandler, Game Night): Liz’s thesis at Georgetown advocated for a single-party nation, which Ellen still finds dangerous and unconstitutional. If such radical ideology took hold, the stereotypical “you’re not good enough for my son” would run second to “you’re a cancer to our country.”

If that doesn’t sound like your idea of entertainment in today’s up-is-down environment (“Isn’t Thanksgiving dinner already fucked-up enough?”), you’re correct. No matter your politics, Anniversary is a major, major downer.

Inadvertently, it’s also one of the nuttiest, most histrionic mainstream movies of immediate recall. As it progresses from mere in-family friction to full-blown Orwellian nightmare, Polish director/co-writer Jan Komasa (2019’s Oscar-nommed Corpus Christi) loses hold of the reins. By the time one character goes undercover as a party clown, or Chandler delivers a Bad Movie Monologue for the ages (“NAME THE DOG! NAME THE DOG! NAME THE DOG!”), I half-wondered if my Lunesta had kicked in. It had not.

Lane and company deserve better material — much better. That said, as heavy-handed and overblown as Anniversary is, I’d rather it be those than, you know, prescient. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Lonely widow Barb (Emma Thompson, Dead Again) just wanted to do a little ice fishing. Instead, she’s running for her life — while trying to save a stranger’s — in the frozen forests of Minnesota (played by Finland) when she accidentally stumbles onto a kidnapping.

And that’s the gist of Dead of Winter, so simple it’s not even deceptively simple. It’s also an exemplary case of show-don’t-tell storytelling as director Brian Kirk (21 Bridges) confidently lets several stretches play without dialogue — and not just because the victim (Laurel Marsden, The Pope’s Exorcist) has her mouth duct-taped for most of the movie.

As the married kidnappers, Marc Menchaca (Companion) conveys menace with a glare, and a de-glammed Judy Greer (The Long Walk) chain-sucks fentanyl lollipops. Meanwhile, Thompson goes full Marge Gunderson in action and accent, with only the latter a bit overdone. So are decades-ago flashbacks on which the movie becomes too reliant (with Thompson’s real-life daughter, Gaia Wise, playing young Barb), needlessly belaboring a point Thompson is able to convey with not a word, all in her face and mannerisms.

Although those retrospective asides loosen a plot that could be as tightly wound as the fishing line we see spooled, the film’s cat-and-mouse machinations across a chessboard of densely packed snow and treacherous ice provide enough subzero thrills for a hunker-down. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

No, Riz Ahmed is not playing deaf again, although the Sound of Metal star doesn’t speak for the first half of Relay. The title even refers to the phone service that facilitates conversations for the hearing-impaired, which Ahmed’s Ash uses to keep his identity secret, being a fixer in the world of corporate espionage and all.

His newest client is Sarah (Lily James, Baby Driver), a genetic scientist in possession of an incriminating document from her former employer. A week before that company goes publicly traded, she wants to broker a deal to give the study back in exchange for the escalating harassment by corporate goons (led by Avatar’s Sam Worthington) to cease.

Attribute Ash’s success in this dangerous business to his adherence to rules regarding his clients — namely, communicating only via relay and never meeting them. But with Sarah looking like Lily James … oops!

Relay starts like crime-pic catnip: at night in New York City, complete with ambient traffic noise, a color palette that pops in gunmetal blue and chewable-children’s-aspirin orange, and the words “directed by David Mackenzie.” He made Hell or High Water, my favorite film of 2016. That pic was bottled lightning, so I wasn’t expecting Relay to reach its level. And it doesn’t.

Yet it’s a solid B. That witnessing multiple instances of Ash’s lightspeed keystrokes — and various relay operators reading to Sarah what he types — isn’t monotonous speaks to the strength of Mackenzie’s direction and Justin Piasecki’s screenplay. Their collaboration operates neatly and quietly in the shadows of 1970s conspiracy-driven thrillers. Even the relay machine Ash lugs around looks appropriately analogue.

Immensely talented, Ahmed seems to enjoy digging into what is essentially a spy film, including the opportunity to be a master of disguise. Relay marks as close as he’s come to leading an action vehicle, because in massive movies like Venom and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, he’s either the villain or the sidekick. Enjoy this while it lasts. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.