I can’t recall the last time I felt as disappointed with the ending of a movie as Lights Out. For the first 70 minutes, I was enjoying a thoroughly entertaining and scary little film with likable characters and inventive sequences, albeit one with some rough dialogue and plot contrivances. The central metaphor about mental illness and depression was interesting,…

The original Purge film is perhaps the worst execution of an interesting premise that I have seen. Here we have a fictional universe in which for one day a year, all crime is made legal for 12 hours, a fascinating concept that the audience immediately wants to explore. Yet in the 2013 original, we are confined to one…