After a bank closes on Easter Saturday, three men burst in to clean out the safe. To help ensure a scot-free getaway, the trio locks the bank manager (Colin Gordon, The Pink Panther) and his cashier (Ann Lynn, A Shot in the Dark) in the vault.

Because the vault is airtight, the looters risk their simple robbery being upgraded to a double murder. One of the thieves (Derren Nesbitt, The Playbirds) has enough of a heart and soul to return to the scene of the crime to free the employees before they run out of oxygen. Through a series of extraordinary circumstances best left to your discovery, that proves easier said than done.

All of 80 minutes, Strongroom qualifies as a ticking-clock thriller, even though director Vernon Sewell (The Blood Beast Terror) approaches the material with a low-key manner typical of the British film industry’s buttoned-up B pictures of the era. In the second half, it even takes something of a sojourn into pavement-pounding detective work to allow a police sergeant (John Dearth, ITV’s The Adventures of Robin Hood) to assemble the puzzle. It’s confidently taut without breaking a sweat.

None of that is to be taken as a weakness. But if you’re looking for one, allow me to point you to the bank manager unwilling to dial or answer a telephone on his own, because that’s what women were for. Anyway, Stronghold: economic storytelling without surrendering anything in return, as one hell of an ending coldly corroborates. —Rod Lott

The salacious true crime story of the Lonely Hearts Killers in the 1940s was dramatized in the down-and-dirty flick The Honeymoon Killers, with Shirley Stoler and Tony Lo Bianco. (Surely, you’ve seen the far-out promotional images for that 1970 movie, right?)

Even though Killers was a slight precursor to John Waters’ comic misanthropy, it took director Arturo Ripstein — one of Mexico’s premier filmmakers — to really give it a sensational retelling in 1996’s dark and dour Deep Crimson, not to be mistaken for Deep Red, Crimson Peak or the pornographic Deep Peaks.

In 1940s Mexico, slightly overweight nurse Coral (the brilliant Regina Orozco) leads an extremely unhappy life. She not only is a single mother of two young kids, but has monstrously bad breath. Her only sexual outlet is to feel up her comatose and disabled patients, and she’s obsessed with actor Charles Boyer, an obsession that plays to her disembodied fantasies of leading a full life.

On the other side of town, Coral meets a man named Nicolás (a swarthy Daniel Giménez Cacho). He’s dangerously slick, well-toupéed and, of course, also seriously lovelorn. After a brief meeting and a slice of cake, they make passionate love and fall head over heels in love. So, what do they do next?

They send her kids to the orphanage, then immediately find a drunken woman to kill with rat poison. After dumping the stranger at a train station, they continue their murderous streak, conning elderly women and taking out their liver-spotted bodies Their worst act is an old-time home abortion that cumulates in the bathtub drowning death of a 4-year-old.

This being 1940s Mexico, justice is appropriately dealt. Cut to credits.

Having seen only a few of Ripstein’s genre films — the severely spooky La Tía Alejandra being the creepiest — I found the impact of the couple’s crimes, combined with the damaged psychology of the mother, makes Deep Crimson a truly engaging movie, especially for Orozco, whose performance always rides the tenuous line between depressive love to maniacal woe. Turning subversive love and perverse longing into a real necessity, Deep Crimson is a dry, dusty tale told through the perceptive lens of the sterile Mexican desert. Ripstein tears apart the Lonely Hearts Killers’ story and rebuilds it the way should have been done right from the beginning. —Louis Fowler

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Told through interrogations, surveillance tapes and general camcorder clowning, Bob Freville’s Confessions in Static isn’t your usual found-footage project. Despite teaser trailers selling otherwise, it isn’t even horror, but a crime story in which the wattage matches the fidelity of the format.

Four friends — including an annoying conspiracy bro and a loathsome crypto investment bro — are questioned separately about the events of Easter weekend, particularly their whereabouts in relation to the Dekker house, the site of a famous Long Island murder spree. As we’re shown via the pals’ videos, which are intercut with the third-degree questioning in a nonlinear fashion, they’re sickened the home is now exploited as an Airbnb to true-crime fanatics, so they decide to do something about it.

While certainly interesting from a square-one premise, Confessions in Static covers acres and acres of conversational ground — from philosophy and dark tourism to Kitty Genovese and Pootie Tang — before viewers are able to form a baseline of understanding, Once you’ve got your bearings, though, you have the twist figured out, halfway before arrival.

That might not be such a problem if the dialogue throughout weren’t so stilted and ostentatious in the key of Kevin Smith, where everyone’s a comedian. It might work for one character, but not all characters, especially as the cast members struggle to deliver lines in the manner intended. Then again, Freville hails from the not-for-everyone’s-taste world of bizarro fiction, where not everything has to jell … and doesn’t. That explains why Static often feels a couple steps removed from the experimental — perhaps the best way to approach it. —Rod Lott

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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

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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.