Rose: A Love Story is yet another example of art-house horror that plays coy with its genre elements. It’s the kind of film that wants to be more than just horror, but winds up ladling on heavy-handed symbolism and doom-laden portent instead of being…
So cold and somber that it becomes dramatically inert, Rose Plays Julie aspires to be a metaphysical investigation into identity but instead gets swallowed up in its own moody ennui. Written and directed by the duo of Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, the film…
It’s not quite accurate to describe Darkness as magic realism, but it’s not strictly a genre piece, either. Much like the children at the story’s center, the film is best considered a kind of chrysalis, shifting and changing shape as the narrative progresses. Directed…
As festival season has gone mostly digital this year, we here at InRO have been able to cover a lot of films from all over the world. Of course, certain trends and patterns appear over time, not least of which is that, for genre…
Nocturne, while imperfect and visually deficient, nonetheless represents the best yet of Amazon’s Welcome to the Blumhouse collab. Part of the second batch of Blumhouse films premiering direct-to-streaming on Amazon, Nocturne, while far from perfect, at least shows what this distribution experiment could be capable…
The third part of Ben Rivers’ so-called “sci-fi” trilogy, following Slow Action (2011) and Urth (2016), Look Then Below gives the unique impression of being an actual alien artifact. It renders the natural unnatural, transforming Earth’s basic signifiers — water, foliage, dirt, rock —…
As film festivals have gone largely virtual in the face of our new pandemic reality, many critics have lamented the now-absent communal aspect of these events; gone are the post-screening conversations and interviews, the mingling in long lines, and the thrill of watching a…
The Projectionist is a lovely elegy for the glory days of film exhibition, one that 2020 has brought into surprising focus. Since getting clean a few years ago, Abel Ferrara has been remarkably productive. Interspersed between more ambitious projects (such as this year’s Tomasso and the…
The Lie is a generic, inauspicious inauguration for Amazon’s Welcome to the Blumhouse collaboration. Just in time for Halloween, uber-producer Jason Blum (and his Blumhouse Pictures) has teamed up with Amazon to release eight features directly to the commerce giant’s streaming platform. While the press…
Possessor is an artfully ultra-violent and surprisingly empathetic mash-up of futuristic and retro genre influences. In Brandon Cronenberg’s debut film Antiviral, there’s a line of dialogue that sticks out as a kind of poetic koan to his sensibility; a salesman specializing in pushing celebrities’ viral contagions…
