For my money, one of the best things you can do this season is to run to see the French director Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance while it is still playing on the big screen.

| Oct 21, 2024

Falls into the category of films that men like to claim as feminist.

| Oct 8, 2024

Extraordinary... This is daring and stylish.

| Oct 8, 2024

The Substance wields its power not with the precision of a scalpel but a jackhammer.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Sep 25, 2024

This is a film unlike any other you will see right now. It will not be to everyone's taste. For this reviewer, who craves originality, it is a winner.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 25, 2024

The last 20 or so minutes of this movie — the best part — is wall-to-wall, nonstop blood and gore, mostly done with those old-school practical effects fans like me prefer. The delightful yuck factor made me forgive the film’s numerous problems.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 24, 2024

Deep within all the oozing spinal fluids and pustulant growths here, there’s a kernel of credibility: The Substance plunges us into the deranged, disorienting emotional carnage of menopause in a way that few other films have managed.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 23, 2024

The Substance is a horrifically absurd exploration of Hollywood’s obsession with beauty.

| Sep 23, 2024

Fargeat delivers a macabre, funny, tragic, absurd and grotesque Grand Guignol of butts and guts; a bonkers and brutal “beauty horror” that elevates the genre to a hysterically unprecedented heights.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 23, 2024

“Gross” does not do justice to this movie’s anatomical perversions. Every ticket sold should come with a commemorative barf bag.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 21, 2024

“Death to subtlety” appears to be the motto of Coralie Fargeat, the French writer-director of The Substance, an audaciously morbid satire on Hollywood, the beauty industry, and the dream of eternal youth.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 20, 2024

The Substance doesn’t quite gel as it should, but it’s potent... Cinema can only benefit from having a figure like Fargeat within its ranks. Sometimes, all that’s needed in art is an unfiltered, guttural scream.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 20, 2024

If there’s a critique to be made about the film, it’s that the satire and caricatures are a bit heavy-handed, with most of the male characters being not-so-subtle misogynists. But that overkill is part of what makes it so much fun.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 20, 2024

With this cross between David Cronenberg body horror and Sunset Boulevard, Moore inserts herself into the Oscar conversation, giving a performance that is both literally naked and operatically dark.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 20, 2024

"Old age ain’t no place for sissies,” Bette Davis once famously quipped, and neither is “The Substance." This bloody body horror satire is sure to have viewers gasping and laughing throughout, especially during its over-the-top finale.

| Sep 20, 2024

It's absolutely full of moments of really full-on -- and I mean REALLY full-on -- theatrical gasp-inducing horror that makes you go [GASP].

| Sep 20, 2024

If it weren’t for Moore and Qualley hurling themselves into the shared role, it’d be as flat as a scotch-taped pin-up. If it weren’t for Moore, I’m not even sure it would work.

| Sep 20, 2024

Pushes everything past the point of moderation and decency until it becomes a riotous discourse on the personal and cultural forces that drive women to madness in search of physical perfection.

| Sep 20, 2024

Demi Moore seizes the role of her lifetime as a movie star turned fitness guru who gets axed for committing the cardinal sin of aging. You’ve never seen anything like the body horrors in Coralie Fargeat’s gory and glorious takedown of youth obsession.

| Sep 20, 2024

Fargeat does grotesque deliciously, and in every way.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 20, 2024