Matthew Fox

To describe Bone Tomahawk as a “horror-Western” is good shorthand, but could be a little misleading. The film indeed has horror elements but novelist turned screenwriter/director S. Craig Zahler seems more interested in spending time with his four main protagonists as they travel across country, letting their different personalities and world views, and the harshness of the terrain, challenge them on their journey

Some films just can’t stick to their strengths. There are some good jump scares inside Extinction, the post-apocalyptic zombie film from Spanish director Miguel Ángel Vivas, adapted from a novel by his countrymen Juan de Dios Garduño, but Vivas (who co-wrote the script with Alberto Marini) is too keen to turn his film into a melodrama to focus on the fright. The result is a plodding zombie drama with too much tonal inconsistency to succeed as either a character study or a terrifying gorefest.

It seems anathema for any zombie movie worth its salt to not be rated R for an excess of gore, and yet, here we are with the long-awaited World War Z, a PG-13 film chock full of the undead, but not much blood in any way. Deafening rumors of script problems aside, the real issue with World War Z lies not specifically with the writing, but with the overly jittery, often obscuring direction from Marc Forster. Even with Brad Pitt as the ostensibly heroic leading man, this movie doesn’t leave much of a memorable mark on the audience, just a mild headache.

The zombie apocalypse has been an oft-explored topic in film, with George Romero often considered the definitive voice, though not the only one, as filmmakers such as Zack Snyder and Danny Boyle have also put their own spin on the mythology. Marc Forster is the latest to try his hand at the genre, helming an …