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      Horror Movie Streaming Guide: ‘The Hole in the Fence,’ ‘Pastacolypse’ and More

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      In this month’s chilling picks, creepypasta and killer pasta, too.‘The Hole in the Fence’Rent it on Amazon.In Joaquín del Paso’s new gut punch of a morality tale, a group of teenagers master machismo at an exclusive summer camp in the Mexican countryside. The true-believer counselors are devoted to training the boys to become Christian tough guys, and if that means looking the other way as the kids bully the possibly gay kid, so be it.Not that the men aren’t watching the teens carefully because they are — through binoculars as they roughhouse shirtless. When the campers find a hole in a fence that divides them from the impoverished town outside, and one of the boys goes missing, it sets in motion a sinister force — of human, not supernatural, origin — with “Lord of the Flies”-style consequences.Emotionally gripping and formally icy, this is horror of the uncomfortable kind, thanks to a script by del Paso and Lucy Pawlak, that’s an exercise in brutality. Take the scene in which two of the teens sense an attraction brewing, and for seconds the camp’s demented lessons in manhood disappear and tenderness takes their place. Their bliss doesn’t last long, because that would get in the way of this skin-crawling film’s expedition to excoriate toxic masculinity, religious radicalism and class and racial entitlements.‘Pastacolypse’Stream it on Tubi.Animated horror films intended for adults don’t come around often these days, so I’m stoked to shout hallelujah for this very funny, stupidly gory horror-comedy from the “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” co-creator Matthew Maiellaro.The story is set in a “pastademic” world where gluten is banned. After being disqualified at the Global Pasta Championship for using bootleg gluten, the billionaire pasta maker Alfredo Manicotti (Dana Snyder) tracks down a hidden gluten reserve. But when he and a security guard, Al Dente Bob (William Sanderson), accidentally fall into a toxic vat of the stuff, it turns them into pasta monsters and gives Alfredo the ability to summon bow-tie demons. Drunk on power and blind to the needs of his spoiled daughter, Emma (Lauren Holt), Alfred sets out to install a “newdle world order” where gluten reigns.That paragraph barely scratches the surface of the cuckoo course this witty, boisterously animated (and free!) film takes. Snyder and Sanderson have stellar comic timing, and their performances elevate the potty-punny humor to whip-smart levels. Sorry, but not sorry: This movie will mac you smile.‘The Hopewell Haunting’Rent or buy on most major platforms.Newt (Timothy Morton) and his wife, Ollie (Audra Todd), show up one day at a small church in 1930s Kentucky to ask James (Ted Ferguson), the cranky old pastor, to bless the house they just moved into, claiming it’s inhabited by a dark spirit. James begrudgingly agrees, but on his first attempt all he finds is a ramshackle house and a dead raccoon. But when James returns, he faces an evil entity that makes him question who, exactly, is the real monster in the house.If it’s haunted house mayhem you want, see “The Boogeyman”; this film walks in the opposite direction. The writer-director Dane Sears delivers a tender but chilling parable about the consequences of unexamined grief and loss; he’s as confident keeping his camera still for long stretches to let darkness do its thing, even if his actors are often too pitched or muted, as he is racing it around. Some horror fans may find the film too spare to be scary, but I savored its austere unfussiness. The real star is the landscape of rural Bourbon County, Ky., where Sears was raised and where he shot parts of his film.‘Malum’Rent or buy it on most major platforms.Jessica (Jessica Sula), a rookie second-generation police officer, asks to be assigned to work the night shift at the station where, one year before, her father killed several colleagues and himself after he helped rescue three cult members in the grip of a Manson-like leader named John Malum (Chaney Morrow). As Jessica wanders the darkened hallways and keeps an eye on the deranged man she locked up in a holding cell, she discovers she’s not alone in a place that may itself be under Malum’s sinister supernatural spell.According to its production notes, Anthony DiBlasi’s movie is an “expanded reimagining” of “Last Shift” (2014), his smaller and scrappier (and to me, superior) film. This version is a similar and equally intense fever dream that reminded me of the terrifying where-are-we mysteries of “The Void.” It’s good-looking too, thanks to Sean McDaniel’s menacing cinematography and Russell FX’s extra-gory makeup effects. Hats off to DiBlasi and his co-writer, Scott Poiley, for being so ambitious with genre; they serve cultism, occultism, a monster, a ghost, comedy, sci-fi and family drama. By the end of the film I was stuffed, but horror fans with more maximalist tastes will be satiated.‘Creepypasta’Stream it on Screambox.Creepypasta, for those unfamiliar with the term, describes online horror stories that depict uncanny nightmare realms; some go viral, like Momo and Slender Man.This entertaining anthology compiles 10 creepypasta fictions from eight directors folded into a framing device about a man who finds a mysterious thumb drive in a house of horrors. The films vary in polish, fright and budget, but they’re generally eerie and all short, in some cases just a few minutes long — a nice departure from some of the bloatedness in the “V/H/S” franchise.My favorite is Tony Morales’s “BEC,” a macabre meditation on mortality. Filmed in blue-tinted black and white (and told in Spanish), it’s about an older woman who wanders her home with her mouth covered in a filthy CPAP mask as a record player plays a warped rendition of “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” You don’t need me to tell you that a wolf isn’t what she should be afraid of. More

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      ‘The Perfect Find’ Review: Gabrielle Union and Keith Powers Light It Up

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      Fashion media workers, paired on a project that caters to their passion for all things vintage, fall for each other in this romance by Numa Perrier.Jenna Jones had it all: a fabulous career at a fashion magazine, power coupledom with a handsome man named Brian — their combined heat had even melted them into one headline-ready portmanteau entity, Brijenna.Then Jenna lost both job and relationship in a spectacular public crash. We can only guess at what happened because her rise and fall are quickly summarized in a collage of headlines during the opening credits of the Netflix romantic comedy “The Perfect Find.”What went down does not matter anyway: What does is that Jenna will get back up, and that Gabrielle Union endows her with the kind of casual charisma found only among elite members of the rom-com world. Good thing Union steers “The Perfect Find” with such sunny warmth and relatable poise, too, because the director, Numa Perrier, and screenwriter, Leigh Davenport (adapting Tia Williams’s 2016 novel of the same title), are not as assured.After a year hiding out at her parents’ house, Jenna returns to New York to rebuild her life. Sucking up her pride, she asks her frenemy — the friend part is very, very small — Darcy (Gina Torres) if there might a job in her media empire.Darcy ends up hiring Jenna as creative director, but not without casually mentioning that our heroine has just turned 45 (even if her skin probably glows even when she’s asleep).Since good things come in pairs, Jenna almost immediately falls for courtly, passionate Eric (Keith Powers), a videographer who happens to be a new colleague, much younger, and Darcy’s son.They embark on an affair that must be kept secret from their common boss, which should be easy since Darcy is barely around. Torres is tragically underused, as are Aisha Hinds and Alani “La La” Anthony as Jenna’s best friends.On a professional level, Jenna and Eric cook up a new segment called “the perfect find” for Darzine, Darcy’s hilariously named, well, magazine, which allows them to explore their shared taste for the vintage and the retro-classy. The adorkable lovebirds are also both fans of old Hollywood movies, bonding over their admiration for the golden-age Black actress Nina Mae McKinney.“The Perfect Find” is hampered by stilted dialogue and comedy that often falls flat, as well as a distinct lack of fizz for a film set in the fashion world. Fortunately, it is saved by two fleet-footed leads who have mastered the two steps forward, one step back dance at the heart of romantic comedy.The Perfect FindNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘World’s Best’ Review: Straight Outta Calculus

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      A math prodigy channels the spirit of his rapper father in this lively musical.“World’s Best,” from the director Roshan Sethi, is a vibrant kid’s musical set to a simple beat. The seventh grade calculus prodigy Prem Patel (Manny Magnus) longs to be as cool and confident as his dad, Suresh (Utkarsh Ambudkar), a rapper who died of cancer when the boy was five years old. Prem’s mother, Priya (Punam Patel), is proud to raise a mathlete — until Prem slips on his father’s gold chain necklace and dad magically appears to inspire him to bust a rhyme at the school talent show. “I’m like a memory remixed with a fantasy,” Suresh says with a grin. I’d go with hype man or hype ghost.Suresh performed in the aughts, but wears ’90s Timberlands and worships the ’80s hitmaker Doug E. Fresh. Maybe the whiz kid can calculate the rate at which nostalgia flattens time? Yet, the script, by Ambudkar and Jamie King, is otherwise attuned to the emotional and comedic details, like when Priya seeks solace in a podcast on grief only to be interrupted by an ad for oat milk.Still, we’re here for the music which builds from subtle, classroom-rattling percussion — imagine the sound of pencils clacking on retainers — to a Hype Williams homage filmed in a five-sided cube with a fisheye lens. The rapping is great but the lyrics are strained (“Think Pythagoras meets Dr. Seuss/Square my sides to find my hypotenuse”) and the music is tinny and canned. I think Sethi wants to emphasize that these ditties are fantasies, but the overall effect is too phony. What works is the high energy, kooky cast who fling themselves into the carefree choreography — especially Magnus, a mugging, contagious delight.World’s BestRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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      ‘I’ll Show You Mine’ Review: Couch Trip

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      This drama, directed by Megan Griffiths, explores abuse and trauma through a potent and prickly series of conversations.“I’ll Show You Mine” teases viewers with its story of a charged, prickly and flirtatious interview between a best-selling author, Priya (Poorna Jagannathan), and a former model, Nic (Casey Thomas Brown), who is the subject and a co-writer of a new book. He’s also Priya’s nephew by marriage.The way that the director Megan Griffiths presents Priya’s pre-interview primping gives the impression that Priya is preparing for a date. This is one of many feints that will keep us guessing about what may happen between the two. And, through potent silences during their conversations about sex and trauma, the film nudges us toward thoughts about what might have occurred between them years earlier, too.Married with kids, Nic was once a young, gender-defying model who strutted his stuff long before nonbinary identities were widely recognized. He still casually defaults to coy-boy charm. Priya is fascinated by, and mistrustful of, what she sees as his ease with sex and gender. Her first book was titled “The Abusive Patriarch(y): A Cultural Autobiography.” And the shadow of bad dads — Priya’s but also Nic’s — hang over them as they begin trading histories in her living room.The director breaks up Priya and Nic’s couch sessions with animated flashbacks, cheekily vivid illustrations and chapter headings. Even so, the movie (written by Tiffany Louquet, Elizabeth Searle and David Shields) is a decidedly talky two-hander. It’s a good thing that Jagannathan and Brown have training in the theater: They imbue Priya and Nic’s densely verbal jousts, dodges and truths with compelling chiaroscuro hues.I’ll Show You MineNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘The Mother and the Whore’: A Threesome and Then Some

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      Jean Eustache’s digitally restored 1973 film, now at Lincoln Center, is part of a full retrospective of his work.Jean Eustache’s unwieldy first feature “The Mother and the Whore” — a transfixing 215-minute talkathon, as well as a cause célèbre since its world premiere at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival — feels less like a masterpiece than a rogue asteroid careening toward your particular home planet.Shown at last year’s New York Film Festival, the 4K digital restoration is screening at Lincoln Center June 23-July 13 as part of a full Eustache retrospective.Eustache, a onetime critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, considered “The Mother and the Whore” autobiographical. Set in the aftermath of France’s May 1968 civil unrest, it concerns a ménage-à-trois. Alexandre, a voluble slacker played by the embodiment of Parisian youth, Jean-Pierre Léaud, is being kept by the slightly older Marie (Bernadette Lafont, herself a New Wave signifier) while he pursues a young, sexually liberated nurse, Veronika (Eustache’s former lover Françoise Lebrun).Alexandre is a creature of impulse and a monster of insistence. Adopting and discarding attitudes, he is given to absurd, self-hypnotizing rants that fascinate Veronika, charm Marie, and appall the viewer as when he holds forth on the satisfaction of washing dishes while watching Marie perform the chore.A dandy who reads Proust and listens to Édith Piaf, Alexandre is obsessed with the past, mainly the aborted revolution of 1968. He is also delusional. “What novel do you think you’re in?” exclaims a former girlfriend whom he has ambushed to make a manic proposal of marriage.Marie, sufficiently grounded to own a boutique (although she and Alexandre live like students with a mattress on the floor), is indulgent and emotional. Veronika, self-contained and frank about her active sex life, is perhaps as crazy as Alexandre. Certainly, as her final soliloquy reveals, she is the most desperate of the three. A neophyte actor caught between two icons, Lebrun delivers an extraordinary performance.“The Mother and the Whore” is largely conversations, in cafes, parked cars and bed. It is filled with movie references but, as suggested by Alexandre’s ex, feels as dense and psychologically resonant as a novel — maybe one by Dostoyevsky. Viewing despair through the prism of sex, the movie has things in common with “Last Tango in Paris,” including Léaud. It is, however, a more anguished and compassionate film. In not quite the last word, a petulant Marie puts on a scratched LP to serenade us with the jaunty bitterness of Piaf’s self-reflexive “Les Amants de Paris.”In 1974, “The Mother and the Whore” was brutally reviewed by the New York Times critic Nora Sayre, who lambasted the film as a reversion to “the movie-sludge of the nineteen-fifties.” There’s nothing particularly ’50s here except the black-and-white cinematography, but Sayre’s complaint is telling: “The discoveries of the last decade have been erased. Or else the sixties never happened.” Exactly. The movie is a eulogy.Eustache made several more personal features before killing himself in 1981. The French critic Serge Daney called him “an ethnologist of his own reality,” adding that Eustache gave a face to the “lost children” of May ’68: “Without him, nothing would have remained of them.”The Mother and the WhoreThrough July 13 at Film at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; filmlinc.org. More

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      Plot Twist at Turner Classic Movies Upsets Film Fans

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      The network’s owner, Warner Bros. Discovery, promised there would be little to no change for viewers despite budget cuts behind the scenes.For many people in Hollywood, including lions like Steven Spielberg, Turner Classic Movies is not a cable channel. It is an extension of their identity.And it took a beating this week.On Tuesday, the network, known as TCM, jettisoned its five most senior executives through a mix of buyouts and pink slips. The departed were Pola Chagnon, the general manager; Charlie Tabesh, the channel’s lead programmer; Genevieve McGillicuddy, who ran the annual TCM film festival; Anne Wilson, a production executive; and Dexter Fedor, a marketer.Warner Bros. Discovery, the network’s owner, promised that viewers would see little to no change on TCM. The channel will remain free of ads. “We remain fully committed to this business, the TCM brand and its purpose to protect and celebrate culture-defining movies,” Kathleen Finch, chairman and chief content officer for the company’s domestic networks group, wrote in a memo that was shared with news outlets.But the channel’s loyalists responded to the cuts with hellfire, interpreting them as a further marginalization of an art form and a personal attack.Our cinemas have been overrun by superheroes. Our film studios have fallen victim to corporate consolidation. FilmStruck, our streaming service for silent-era gems and noir classics, was shut down. And now you are gutting TCM, our last happy place, where Orson Welles is mercifully alive and well and “Key Largo” (1948) still counts as a summer blockbuster?Using an expletive, Ryan Reynolds sounded an alarm on Twitter, telling his 21 million followers that TCM was a fixture in his life and calling the channel “a holy corner of film history — and a living, breathing library for an entire art form.” Mark Harris, a journalist and film historian, called the cuts “a catastrophic talent purge.” Patton Oswalt, an actor and writer, took direct aim at David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, cursing him on Twitter and saying, “You couldn’t just leave this one alone?”Mr. Zaslav routinely describes himself as a colossal fan of classic cinema. He keeps TCM playing in his office, where he proudly works from the same desk used by Jack Warner, one of the studio’s founders. In recent months, Mr. Zaslav, who took over Warner Bros. last year, has been celebrating the studio’s 100th anniversary.Is it just an act?By late Wednesday, three Hollywood titans — Mr. Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson — had issued an unusual joint statement saying they had spoken to Mr. Zaslav and were “heartened and encouraged.”“We are committed to working together to ensure the continuation of this cultural touchstone that we all treasure,” the statement said. “Turner Classic Movies has always been more than just a channel. It is truly a precious resource of cinema, open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And while it has never been a financial juggernaut, it has always been a profitable endeavor since its inception.”The directors added, “We have each spent time talking to David, separately and together, and it’s clear that TCM and classic cinema are very important to him.”The filmmakers said Mr. Zaslav, in fact, had privately reached out to them earlier in the week to discuss the restructuring of TCM. “We understand the pressures and realities of a corporation as large as WBD, of which TCM is one moving part,” the directors said. “Our primary aim is to ensure that TCM’s programming is untouched and protected.”Michael Ouweleen, the president of Cartoon Network and Discovery Family, will now oversee TCM.Bryan Bedder/Getty ImagesIn a business sense, TCM is a financial footnote for Warner Bros. Discovery, an entertainment conglomerate with roughly 37,000 employees worldwide and $34 billion in annual revenue. But like every other media mogul, Mr. Zaslav is wrestling with a no-win situation: Cable television, which has long powered media conglomerates, is in terminal decline, meaning that operational costs must also go down. Budget cuts have affected all of the company’s many divisions.Fewer than 50 million homes will pay for cable or satellite service by 2027, down from 64 million today and 100 million seven years ago, according to a recent PwC report.So the belt tightening at TCM was more about preservation than annihilation, at least in Warner Bros. Discovery’s view. Ben Mankiewicz, Jacqueline Stewart and the other TCM hosts will continue in their roles, according to a spokeswoman. TCM will continue to pay for access to classic films from all studios; there is no plan to restrict the channel to Warner Bros. movies. TCM will also continue to be featured as a “brand hub” on Max, the company’s streaming service.Michael Ouweleen, the president of Cartoon Network, among other channels, will oversee TCM going forward. He is based in Atlanta. TCM was previously part of his portfolio on an interim basis.“Michael shares our passion for classic films and believes strongly in TCM’s essential role in preserving and spotlighting iconic movies for the next generation of cinephiles,” Ms. Finch said in her memo.Mr. Ouweleen might be smart to remember that, for TCM’s devotees, the network’s programming is less entertainment and more “the stuff that dreams are made of.” More

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      ‘The Country Club’ Review: Who’s Your Caddy?

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      The sisters Fiona and Sophia Robert wrote and star in this broad, pastel-colored golf comedy.It’s hard to make a golf comedy without evoking “Caddyshack,” the ribald 1980 classic starring Chevy Chase and Bill Murray, and with its crude humor, farcical innuendo and posh eponymous setting, “The Country Club” certainly warrants the comparison. But the influence the movie more obviously courts is early Wes Anderson, especially his sophomore feature “Rushmore”: The director Fiona Robert (who also co-wrote the film with her sister, Sophia Robert, both of whom star) leans heavily on Anderson’s unmistakable, easily imitated style, using rigidly symmetrical compositions, sudden zooms and a heightened pastel color palette. As if to underscore the similarities, the movie even opens with a handcrafted, pleasantly fastidious title sequence with credits inscribed on tees and golf balls that fairly exudes twee Andersonia.These visual flourishes, while derivative, are charming and well-realized. The writing, however, has none of Anderson’s wit, tending instead toward a kind of broad and fatuous slapstick that’s closer to “2 Broke Girls” than “The Royal Tenenbaums.”This story of a pair of working-class teenage interlopers crashing an upper-crust golf tournament has a predictable sitcom rhythm, and features expository monologues of astonishing clumsiness, such as this dud, from the working-class hero Elsa (Sophia Robert) to her sister, Tina (Fiona Robert): “I guess I’m just upset about dad getting laid off. College is so far out of reach now!” The jokes are scarcely better. There is a long, long, unfunny sequence involving flatulence. According to the credits, those noise effects were provided by the comedian Steve Higgins. They were not worth crediting.The Country ClubNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Here. Is. Better.’ Review: A Glimmer of Hope

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      Four military veterans go through PTSD treatments in this understated documentary.In 2018, Jason Kander, a rising star in politics who was running for mayor of Kansas City, suddenly dropped out of the race, of which he was the front-runner. Kander, a veteran who had spent time as an Army intelligence officer in Afghanistan, announced that he would be seeking treatment for PTSD and depression.He recalls the internal battle that roiled within him for over a decade in “Here. Is. Better.,” a documentary that follows four military veterans who each undergo different forms of PTSD treatment. Kander is the most high-profile subject of the film, and, consequently, the clearest example of one of its primary points: Those suffering from PTSD are often fighting a war that is invisible to both the general public and the sufferers themselves, who regularly struggle to believe they are worthy — or in need of — help.Indeed, even as we see the film’s subjects describing and confronting horrific events, there is something painfully quiet about how the trauma looks from the outside. There are no breakdowns, exceptional stories or intensely dramatic moments (save for one visceral scene at a hockey game that the film does a disservice by overediting). Instead, the documentary, directed by Jack Youngelson, is about the slow, difficult work of reaching out, opening up and eventually finding a glimmer of hope, day by day.In this sense, Youngelson’s film is not formally spectacular and doesn’t necessarily pack the showiest emotional wallop. But those traits likely make it truer to the lives of these veterans, as full of silent courage as they are of tragedy.Here. Is. Better.Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More