With slick, visual style, writer-director John Rosman skilfully keeps everything grounded, which makes the bonkers craziness and excellent makeup work that much more effective.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 4, 2024

Amid the dumper-truck of post-Covid lockdown-inspired films, very few take disease and pandemics themselves as their central focus. So John Rosman’s stripped-back but effective debut is a sobering flashback to those incubative early days.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 29, 2024

New Life entertains with fast-moving shooting action, creepy screaming creatures, ample guts, and moments of profound humanity.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | May 22, 2024

While New Life holds few pleasures as it twists and convulses into new genres, it excels at glimpses of terror and jaded job execution.

Full Review | May 22, 2024

An unsettling relevance lingers beneath the surface of this taut and tightly wound thriller that puts a fresh spin on familiar genre conventions.

Full Review | May 10, 2024

New Life is filled with potential, moving close but stopping on the edge of excellence. A well-acted, well-directed, well-written film to help you turn off the world for a few moments.

Full Review | Original Score: B | May 10, 2024

While the horror moments in the film are far more effective than the dramatic moments, New Life keeps viewers hooked and engaged throughout.

Full Review | Original Score: 7.5/10 | May 10, 2024

Surprisingly compassionate and ultimately compelling, this ironically titled debut might under the skin of those who may be immune to the usual methods of pandemic panic.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 9, 2024

“Rosman builds to a powerful resolution and ideal ending moment in ‘New Life,’ using gore and traditional methods to escalate the tension, and then pulls the rug away from the audience — a reminder of who’s in control, a tease of what’s to come.”

Full Review | May 9, 2024

Lovers of hard-core horror with elements of science fiction and allusions to body horror, rejoice. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | May 7, 2024

A deeply human piece wrapped in the skin of a thriller, New Life will stick with you for years to come.

Full Review | May 7, 2024

This interesting attempt to mix body-horror suspense with character drama doesn't entirely work, because the intended psychological depths are underdeveloped. But it's worth a gander, not least for former Berkeley Rep company member Tony Amendola.

Full Review | May 6, 2024

‘New Life’ combines them with bursts of blood and fury, but the tenseness provides some emotional brevity to push it past a theme we’re familiar with.

Full Review | May 6, 2024

Rosman falls back on an all-too-familiar bag of tricks to conjure some would-be scares.

Full Review | May 6, 2024

The possibility of an anticlimax becomes something more akin to an inevitability.

Full Review | May 6, 2024

Though New Life's characters may not find the world they are desperately running towards, it is Rosman’s work that contains entire worlds of its own.

Full Review | May 4, 2024

The film does some interesting things with [its concept], playing with the agony of lingering self-awareness amidst terrifying bodily transformations. The makeup is superb, and the over-the-top practical effects got at least one gasp out of me.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 3, 2024

Once the picture of what's really happening here becomes clear, it only highlights how gimmicky the structure is and how shallow the movie's goals are.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | May 3, 2024

The first half of writer/director John Rosman’s New Life is intentionally confounding, and the genre-bending payoff is more than worth it

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 2, 2024

There’s a sense of urgency in these characters’ motivations that made me nervous about what would happen next.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | May 1, 2024