The Front Room is an entertaining, morbidly funny slice of perverse B-movie exploitation horror. In the best way, it feels like something Joan Crawford would have starred in the 60s.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 29, 2024

Kathryn Hunter elevates everything she’s in, which goes double for a film as limp and directionless as The Front Room, the directorial debut of Max and Sam Eggers.

| Oct 27, 2024

The perverse playfulness with which Hunter handles even the most grotesque scatological scenes fuels a disturbing yet stellar performance, one that’s far more memorable than the movie as a whole.

| Sep 9, 2024

Judging by the enthusiasm at the theater for Belinda’s sharpened jibes as Solange’s antics become impossible to ignore, The Front Room does capture one delicious, rich truth: hell hath no fury like a mother-in-law scorned.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 7, 2024

The premise proposes a battle of wits and control via a brewing storm between the two leads that never really comes to pass.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 6, 2024

A mean-spirited hagsploitation movie, neither scary nor funny. “The Front Room” just puts your gag reflexes to test by humiliating an old body, and tries to get away with it by making the owner of that body an actually awful mother-in-law from hell.

| Sep 6, 2024

While The Front Room has a couple of blessings in a big performance from Kathryn Hunter and a handful of well-presented shots, none of it coalesces in any meaningful way, and it ends so quickly that it feels like a crucial 15 minutes of footage got lost.

| Original Score: D | Sep 6, 2024

The Eggers Brothers have a canny way of balancing those wildly different tones. We’re frightened for each character, even when we point and giggle at them. It’s a twisted film.

| Sep 5, 2024

[Max and Sam Eggers] did draw out some good performances, with Norwood hanging tough with a couple of accomplished theater-trained pros in Hunter and Burnap. Still, that’s not enough to make “The Front Room” worth the trade-off.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Sep 5, 2024

“The Front Room” does at least have farting in common with the family’s oeuvre.

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | Sep 5, 2024

Yet from its goo to boos, the whole enterprise is so familiar and at times rote that it feels as though Sam and Max Eggers haven't so much directed the movie as reverse-engineered it.

| Sep 5, 2024

The Eggers' movie hinges on that wonderfully unhinged performance from Hunter, and The Front Room is extremely, admirably gross with a hefty dose of camp. Unfortunately, that’s all there is here.

| Sep 5, 2024

The Front Room perhaps leans more toward the repulsive than the highbrow, potentially carving out its own distinct genre niche.

| Sep 5, 2024

The Front Room seems to know it’s a tonal disaster, but maybe there’s no point to being tidy when you’re just screwing around with your audience’s gag reflex.

| Original Score: C- | Sep 5, 2024

It mixes light surrealism and gross-out humor for a blackly comic, ill-mannered romp whose parts are ultimately more compelling than the arthritic whole.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 5, 2024