This is more than just a nihilistic revamp of Home for the Holidays. It's bleaker than that, more forensic in its analysis of innate human hopelessness.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 2, 2022

The casting is... first-rate, with Richard Jenkins and a wounded, garrulous Jayne Houdyshell the standouts.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 2, 2022

The ensemble remains electrifying against the damp.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 31, 2021

The result is like an expressionist horror by Polanski.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 30, 2021

There's palpable dread throughout this stagey but nevertheless evocative whirlwind of dysfunction.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 30, 2021

[Writer-director Stephen Karam's] dialogue -- overlapping, percussive, ultimately musical -- is as exquisitely observed as it is immaculately performed by this cracking cast. It's as if Samuel Beckett had written a sitcom.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 30, 2021

At times, unexplained booming noises from upstairs, burned-out lights, and the claustrophobia of it all shade the ambience into horror movie territory. Chekhov by electric lamplight, A24 style, for the holidays.

| Dec 4, 2021

A collision of horror and humor that's as human as it is cringeworthy

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 4, 2021

The Humans features no ghosts, monsters, or poltergeists. It's not set inside a haunted house, an abandoned building, or a tract of shadowy woods. And yet, it might be the scariest movie of the year.

| Dec 3, 2021

The performances are quite good; everyone here is being so naturalistic... I'm not sure that I need that sense of the horror film, though.

| Dec 1, 2021

The claustrophobia is the point.

| Dec 1, 2021

The actors are uniformly impeccable; none are stars and they're all perfection. This is one of the rare one-set theater pieces that has actually been enhanced and deepened through its transfer to the screen.

| Nov 29, 2021

Rather than wear influences on his sleeve, the first-time director has fabricated a bespoke suit out of them -- but it's still his work.

| Nov 29, 2021

A six-person cast can be hard to pull off if there's a weak link. Luckily, there is not.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 28, 2021

It's a savagely sophisticated film.

| Nov 25, 2021

The house is definitely haunted in "The Humans," Stephen Karam's skillfully filmed adaptation of his Tony-winning 2016 play.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 24, 2021

"The Humans" gets a lot done in a short amount of time, in a single, two-level setting, plus a few fraught intimations of what's down the hall or around the corner.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 24, 2021

The Humans, writer/director Stephen Karam's arty, melancholic screen adaptation of his Tony award-winning play, is painful in a good way; the anguish of the characters is aching and heartfelt.

| Nov 24, 2021

"The Humans" was an unsettling play. As a movie, it's flat-out terrifying.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 24, 2021

The cast's chemistry never quite gels beyond their staged circumstances, and too much of the dialogue replicates actual life without finding a deeper resonance...

| Original Score: C+ | Nov 24, 2021