Featuring powerfully atmospheric music and sound design, and a sense of tropical place so moistly palpable one might feel concerned about developing crotch rot after viewing, Venezuelan writer-director Jorge Thielen Armand’s third feature, Death Has No Master, is well dressed up but doesn’t really go anywhere.

Mind you, his previous full-length works, La Soledad and La Fortaleza (Fortitude), were similarly light on action but strikingly moody. However, somehow their arthouse idiosyncrasies felt more audacious. Given that this is his first outing with a relatively well-known star — Asia Argento, playing a woman returning from Europe to Venezuela to sell off her late father’s cacao estate — expectations may have perhaps irrationally piqued that he’d up his game somehow. But the final product doesn’t come to a boil, despite the promising simmering of the first act.

After an ominous maybe-dream/maybe-flashback sequence, never entirely explained, which finds Argento’s protagonist Caro in a ravine where one masked man covered in blood (Roberto Conde) encourages her to kill another (David Tiburcio), the action cuts abruptly to Caro, newly landed in the country. After being stopped by cops looking for a quick bribe, her driver reassures her that Venezuela is much safer now that they’ve killed all the criminals.

Not entirely reassured, but at least in possession of the deeds to her father’s house where she grew up after meeting her lawyer Roque (Jorge Thielen Hedderich, the director’s father and star of La Fortaleza), Caro arrives at the decrepit mansion. A stone construction decorated with bas-relief Corinthian column motifs with an interior that’s all chipped parquet flooring and shabby chic Victorian furniture, the house is by this point barely separate from the encroaching tropical forest that surrounds it. No wonder Roque has warned her that the house and the land surrounding it are not worth the million dollars she expects; she’ll be lucky if it fetches half that.

But home improvement is the least of Caro’s worries. There are various people living at the house, seemingly at the dispensation of Sonia (Dogreika Tovar, a non-professional with an incredible screen presence). Sonia remembers Caro from the old days when she worked for Caro’s father, and has been at the house for years, living there now with her son Maiko (Yermain Sequera, another find), a kid old enough to be in elementary school if only he were enrolled in one. A tenant (José Aponte) rents a room from Sonia and may sometimes share her bed, while old retainer Yoni (Arturo Rodríguez) also has the run of the estate, especially the plantation. Luckily, his loyalties lie more with Caro, which is lucky as things swiftly turn sour between Caro and Sonia when the former tells the latter she’s going to have to leave so Caro can sell the estate.

Not that we see her getting in the real-estate agents or even doing much about the dead leaves everywhere. After spending a lot of time in bed and looking at mysterious books of illustrations her father left lying about among his Chekhovian rifle and machete, Caro moves to the town for a while to stay in a hotel and plot with Roque about how to get rid of Sonia. The police are clearly not going to help, claiming that Sonia has a right to stay put having lived there more than five years, and anyway, she has other legal claims on the place.

Presumably, this was all filmed well before U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro earlier this year, not that the abduction has had much effect on the country’s regime. But it’s clear from the attitude of the locals that no one likes a pushy, arrogant gringa like Caro around these parts, least of all one who struts about in leather boots and a gaucho hat like she owns the place. Well, yes, she does own it technically, but it’s not a good look here, where the sufferings of colonial rule are well remembered. As one policewoman points out, all she’s lacking is a whip. (Don’t worry, there’s also a whip back at the house, which will play a significant role in the story.)

Argento has enough instinctive ferality about her to make her blend well with the less experienced actors, but this is not one of her better performances and the character is very underwritten. The sound and music tracks by Sylvain Bellemare and Vittorio Giampietro, respectively, have to work extra hard to make it feel like something is going to happen, eventually, and it won’t be pretty. Mission accomplished, but that doesn’t quite make for an entirely satisfying viewing experience.

Train to Busan’s director is back with a new zombie movie, and Rotten Tomatoes reviews are pouring in. Here’s what critics are saying about Yeon Sang-ho’s Colony after its Cannes 2026 premiere.

What critics are saying about Colony in reviews

Director Yeon Sang-ho’s latest Korean zombie thriller Colony has drawn a range of reactions from critics following its Cannes 2026 premiere. The film stars Jun Ji-hyun as a professor trapped inside a sealed biotech facility after a rapidly mutating virus breaks out among conference attendees.

On the positive side, Joonatan Itkonen of Region Free called the film “clever and unexpected, if never quite scary,” praising it as “a thrilling zombie romp from one of the masters of the genre.” Juan Luis Caviaro of Espinof agreed it has “everything it takes to become another hit for Korean genre cinema,” while Nikki Baughan of Screen International noted that “as a modern zombie movie, Colony certainly has a satisfying bite.” Chris Bumbray of JoBlo called it “an epic return to zombie-form from the director of Train to Busan.”

Not all critics were convinced, however. Emma Kiely of Little White Lies felt the film’s concept “isn’t nearly revolutionary enough to hang a two-hour film on.” Ritesh Mehta of IndieWire observed that while “the deck he crafts is often masterful,” the film’s “communication lessons and memory of human loss don’t hit hard enough.” Jason Gorber of Next Best Picture was the harshest, calling the film “flawed and forgettable.”

Colony gets a strong score on Rotten Tomatoes

Despite the mixed opinions, Colony currently holds a Fresh score of 70% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 10 critic reviews. The majority of reviewers awarded the film 3 or 4 out of 5 stars, with praise centered on its creature design and relentless pacing.

With a limited U.S. theatrical release set for August 28, 2026 through Well Go USA Entertainment, the film’s solid Tomatometer score suggests it should appeal to fans of Korean action-horror. Colony may not reach the heights of Train to Busan, but the early critical consensus positions it as a worthy genre entry from a proven filmmaker.

Boots Riley holds nothing back in his audacious, surrealist social satire “I Love Boosters.” The film is a go-for-broke expression of wild imagination and social consciousness that’s impossible not to admire for its wacky, bold vision, with teleporting, high fashion snobbery and pyramid schemes.

Here is a movie where we get Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie and Taylour Paige leading a vigilante shoplifting operation, Demi Moore as a toxic girl boss, Don Cheadle as a sleazy lifestyle evangelist, Will Poulter as a fussy store manager and LaKeith Stanfield as a discount brand model with a strange accent and a hypnotizing stare. It sounds like fun, right? Like a raucous, madcap ride through the inequities of the fashion business from the executive suite, down to the retail store where the goods are sold and the Chinese factories where they’re made? And on a certain level it is all of that, but one thing it is not is very funny. “I Love Boosters” can be amusing and clever, but the laugh-out-loud comedy just isn’t quite there. And it doesn’t help that the film goes more off the rails as it progresses to a climax that is less rousing than mind-numbing.

The thing is, “I Love Boosters” does start on a strong, albeit minor key as we’re introduced to the Velvet Gang, Corvette (Palmer), Sade (Ackie) and Mariah (Paige) and their booster operation, stealing overpriced designer wares from high end stores and selling them for a steep discount on the street. There’s a kind of a Robin Hood sensibility to it all. Mariah calls it “Triple F,” or “Fashion Forward Filanthropy.” She knows how to spell philanthropy, she deadpans; This is branding.

But despite the colorful surroundings, there’s a pervasive hopelessness in this off-kilter world that looks a lot like our own. Corvette, particularly, feels outside of it all, as a woman who dreams of being a designer herself but is currently squatting in a closed fast food chicken shop and being haunted by a boulder of debt (like, literally). It doesn’t help that the founder she idolizes, Moore’s Christie Smith, has become obsessed with stopping the boosters. To Christie, a genius megalomaniac, they’re the big problem with her business and not the fact that her store employees are being paid a pittance and her factory employees even less. The people who work at the factories are also getting sick from sandblasting the denim. And yes, these are all real things.

Eiza González’s vaping Violeta becomes the face of the store employees forced to use their own paychecks to buy their uniforms. Poppy Liu’s Jianhu, who teleports herself from China to the Bay Area, is that for the factory workers. This oddball group of five women band together to get revenge against Christie. Again, this all sounds like it should be a fun time, but the film is too busy jumping around and throwing ideas and concepts at the screen (teleporting somehow the least distracting of them) for us to spend much time just hanging out with these vibrant personalities.

It is a crime that this is only Riley’s second produced movie. Though it might not reach the crackling heights of his debut, “Sorry to Bother You,” his imagination is still on fire. Unlike so much of what’s out there, “I Love Boosters” has both style and substance, which is worth something even if it doesn’t land perfectly (or capably inspire any kind of revolution). In a marketplace full of content and franchises, here is a filmmaker with something to say and an interesting way to say it.

“I Love Boosters,” a Neon release in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “strong sexual content, brief drug use, nudity and language throughout.” Running time: 115 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.