Title: Kill List Director: Ben Wheatley Starring: Neil Maskell, MyAnna Buring, Harry Simpson, Michael Smiley, Emma Fryer There has to be a storytelling flaw here. Kill List had a decent amount of intense sequences but you kind of get the feeling that you should be more into this while watching the 95 minutes unravel. And unravel is the proper term for this British flick. What starts out as an awkward, yet train wreck interesting, dinner party between two couples; quickly morphs into a hitman chronicle that flows into a battle with the occult. How and why is never truly addressed at either transition point, yet the curiosity levels remain high….

Title: Needle Directed by: John V. Soto Starring: Ben Mendelsohn, Tahyna Tozzi and Travis Fimmel Running time: 89 minutes, Rated R After the death of his father, Ben receives an intricately decorated 18th century mechanical box which is labeled “Le Vaudo Mort.” The box itself is actually a supernatural tool for revenge, as the victim’s photo is placed into the box, and a wax voodoo doll is formed after turning the hand crank. Ben shows the box off to his college friends, and after a party it’s discovered that the box was stolen. Soon Ben’s friends start dying in very gruesome and horrible ways. Ben’s estranged brother Marcus, a forensic…

Title: The Hunters Directed by: Chris Bryant Starring: Steven Waddington, Diana Agron, Chris Briant, Tony Becker, Terence Knox Running Time: 111 minutes, Rated R A group of men spend their weekends together at a little spot in the wilderness called Fort Goben.  It’s a place where men can be men, and hunt some humans who just happen upon their private sanctuary. Just a typical weekend with the guys. Director Chris Briant plays Le Saint, an Iraq war veteran suffering from PTSD who is trying to live a normal life, and is anxious to use his analysis skills in an investigation into several missing persons cases. When he chooses to meet…

“Rise of the Planet of the Apes” was a $480 million worldwide hit, but buzz-averse distributor 20th Century Fox rolled out the movie in early August with a blitz of TV advertising but otherwise so little fanfare (as per their usual operating procedure, screenings for critics were “opt-in,” and additionally hush-hush) that a lot of more savvy filmgoers who perhaps look to advance reviews and feature coverage peeks as signs of studio confidence in the marketplace thought the movie was a brainless dud. Far from it, actually. Director Rupert Wyatt’s reboot of Tim Burton’s reboot of Fox’s second most well known franchise property (not counting “Star Wars,” which they don’t own)…

Topher Grace came of age on the small screen, in the hit sitcom “That ’70s Show.” Acting was never necessarily part of the grand plan when he was younger, however, so he’s leveraged the success of that experience into a more diverse portfolio on the big screen, dabbling in everything from action movies (“Predators”) and big-budget comic book adventures (“Spider-Man 3″) to political dramas (“Too Big To Fail”) and more offbeat dramedies (“In Good Company”). His new film is “The Double,” an espionage thriller in which he stars with Richard Gere, as an old-and-new pair of government operatives trying to track down a long-dormant but newly resurfaced Russian assassin. ShockYa…

Too many romantic comedies witlessly hone in on the differences between men and women to create a heightened-stakes backdrop in which every interaction with the opposite sex is imbued with some sort of grand, gender-statement significance, which is of course then supposed to be neatly resolved and tidily put away by the time a paired-off happy ending rolls around. Co-written by Annie Mumolo and “Saturday Night Live”‘s Kristen Wiig, “Bridesmaids” instead focuses a considerable amount of its energy on female friendships, yes, but also the things women want in relationships — love, security, availability — that are the same as men. The result is the best female-fronted Hollywood comedy in years, and a…

Title: The Entitled Directed by: Aaron Woodley Starring: Kevin Zegers, Ray Liotta and Victor Garber Running time: 91 minutes, Rated R, available on standard DVD Struggling college student Paul Dynan is working a dead-end job while trying to help support his family, when times just keep getting harder. When he’s out of options, he devises a plan with the help of two friends to extort $3 million out of the parents of the more privileged students who don’t take their education and futures as seriously. When the plan goes off track, Paul has to improvise while still staying in control. Every few years or so, a caper movie like this…

Title: A Horrible Way To Die Directed by: Adam Wingard Starring: AJ Bowen, Amy Seimetz and Joe Swanberg Running time: 87 minutes, Rated R, available on standard DVD Serial killer Garrick Turrell has escaped from prison and is continuing on a killing spree leading towards his ex-girlfriend Sarah who had turned him in. Sarah is a recovering alcoholic who is trying to get her life back on track when she meets Kevin, a guy who attends the same AA meetings with her. In order to open herself up to this new man in her life, she must let go of her past which is constantly haunting her. The only problem…

Title: 5 Days of War Director: Renny Harlin Starring: Rupert Friend, Richard Coyle, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Val Kilmer, Heather Graham, Johnathon Schaech, Rade Sherbedgia, Dean Cain, Andy Garcia There are those direct-to-video movies that somehow, rather inexplicably and seemingly unfairly, bypass theaters altogether and arrive on DVD with an entirely unearned stench of career desperation (this was to be the fate of “Slumdog Millionaire,” actually, until Fox Searchlight rescued it from the clutches of Warner Bros., who knew not what they had — or at least not how to market it), and then there are those straight genre programmers that feature a third-tier wrestler-turned-actor, and were never being made with theatrical…

Title: John Carpenter’s The Ward Directed by: John Carpenter Starring: Amber Heard, Lyndsy Fonseca and Jared Harris Running time: 88 minutes, Rated R, available on standard DVD After burning down a farmhouse in 1966, Kristen is brought to the North Bend Psychiatric Hospital in Oregon. She meets with several same-age institutionalized girls who are being treated by Dr Gerald Stringer. While taking a shower, she is attacked by a girl whom she reveals is named Alice, a former patient who had mysteriously disappeared. Soon the other girls begin to disappear or wind up murdered by a misused therapy device. Kristin is on a mission to escape the mental ward or…