Midnight Movie If you like low-budget horror, there’s a lot to like about this one. It has a spunky heroine (Rebekah Brandes) who might be the most appealing “scream queen” since Jamie Lee Curtis, a clever setup (trapped with a killer in a movie theater), and one line — “You want her? You gotta go through me first!” — that, in context, is priceless. Sadly, it also has the usual bane of low-budget schlock: a plot that quickly turns preposterous. Release: 2008 Grade: C+
*****
Source Code It’s Groundhog Day for poor Jake Gyllenhaal, who must repeatedly travel back in time to prevent an act of terrorism — and repeatedly get blown up in the process. Clever ideas are introduced, but cramming action-movie sequences, a budding romance, and metaphysical musings into one 93-minute film results in an incoherent mess. Release: 2011 Grade: B-
*****
The Orphanage This Spanish chiller about a woman (Belen Rueda) returning to her childhood home, an orphanage, is a handsome production, replete with moody, haunting atmosphere — but not much in the way of actual scares. Orphanage doesn’t insult your intelligence, which is refreshing, but several plot elements in this ghost story are a bit, ahem, familiar. Release: 2007 Grade: B
*****
Orphan With just a tweak here and a nudge there, Orphan might have joined the likes of The Sixth Sense and The Exorcist as one of the great horror films. It has a delicious twist, some fine performances and, unlike those other films, it manages to frighten without resorting to the supernatural. Eleven-year-old Isabelle Fuhrman, utterly convincing as the titular demon-child, almost — but not quite — pulls off a pivotal transformation late in the film; if she had, Linda Blair might have had competition in evil kid horror-movie history. Release: 2009 Grade: B+
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