Dog Soldiers (Neil Marshall, 2002). A group of soldiers dispatched on a training exercise in Scotland come upon another squadron of military men who have been torn apart by a mysterious adversary. After a fresh attack happens, the survivors are rescued by a zoologist (Emma Cleasby) who takes them to a farmhouse. This seeming safe space is soon beset by the assailants, a batch of towering, sinewy, snarling werewolves. Dog Soldiers is a decidedly B-movie endeavor, and the modest scale of its budget shows up in every jostled frame. It winds up feeling like a horror movie put together by ambitious kids. Want to show someone who’s had their intestines torn out? Just plop a string of sausages smeared with ketchup on their belly. Problem solved. There are a couple clever-enough plot turns in the script, but there’s a whole lot more dialogue that’s downright brutal. Several of the performances are similarly rough. As the main human villain in the movie, Liam Cunningham chomps more scenery than the supernatural lupine monsters smashing through doors and walls.

Splitsville (Michael Angelo Covino, 2025). Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin make an interesting team. They write darkly funny, warped-emotion screenplays together and star together in the resulting films. Covino is the credited director, but it feels like true team authorship. In Splitsville, their second feature using this creative structure, Marvin plays Carey, a sad sack who’s cast aside by his dissatisfied wife, Ashley (Adria Arjona). Covino plays his arrogant friend Paul, who’s in a newly opened marriage with Julie (Dakota Johnson). The quartet proceeds through messy entanglements, many of them involving pangs of confused sexual need. It’s fun to watch Covino and Marvin present the exaggerated unreality of broad screen comedies with a more sedate indie film tone. That technique does tend to blunt the emotional impact of the story, but the film is still impressive in its bruising humor. The most effective running gag centers on the collection of suitors who Ashley picks up and casts aside, only to have them stick around in a sort of impromptu communal household presided over by Carey.

Quintet (Robert Altman, 1979). It’s hard to know where to even begin with this piece of auteurist dystopian sci-fi that broods and ponders and doesn’t make a lick of sense. Quintet takes place in a dystopian future suffering through a new ice age. Essex (Paul Newman) journeys with his pregnant wife, Vivia (Brigitte Fossey), to a insular community in search of his brother (Thomas Hill). There, they are drawn into investigation of a strange conspiracy involving several murders. The screenplay — co-credited to Altman, Frank Barhydt, and Patricia Resnick — borders on the incoherent. The story moves vaguely from one half-remembered fragment of fantastical fiction to another, as if the writers were drawing from a short story collection read while blissfully stoned. Altman’s directing follows right in line, with several scenes shots through a haze. It regularly feels like Newman is completely detached from the action going on. When his character is trying to figure out the unfolding scheme, it plays like Newman is simply confused by the material. The one scene where the performance almost works is when his character gets a little drunk, as if Newman is elated he finally understands what he’s being asked to do.