The Banishing is a welcome-back for director Christopher Smith, rendering fresh what could have been boilerplate, and keeping its human horrors palpably textual. It’s curious that director Christopher Smith seems to have never really caught on in the horror world, even working within a genre…
by Daniel Gorman Film Streaming Scene
Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another | Jessica Sarah Rinland
Not all of the poetic evocations of Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Those That work, but it’s still a lively, playful, and niche document of art creation. Jessica Sarah Rinland begins her experimental documentary/essay film Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another with an epigraph: “When…
Mauricio Franco Tosso’s Samichay, in Search of Happiness seeks to render the life of a peasant farmer on a grand, mythopoetic canvas, and it’s mostly successful, although its reach occasionally exceeds its grasp. Celestino (Amiel Cayo), a poor, indigenous Peruvian, lives in a small…
Pitched somewhere between the bone-dry absurdism of Lucrecia Martel’s Zama and the minimalist drone of Lisandro Alonso’s Los Muertos, Diego Mondaca’s Chaco refashions the war picture as an existential journey through a barren, purgatorial landscape that ends in annihilation. An introductory title card offers…
The Power doesn’t hold a lot of mystery but thrives by situating its political and cultural critiques as blunt, horrific text. There’s something sinister lurking in the dark in writer/director Corinna Faith’s new period horror film The Power. Set in January 1974, amongst a…
by Daniel Gorman Film Horizon Line
This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection | Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese
This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection is a remarkable debut, a tonally complex and visually sumptuous marvel. Existing in a kind of liminal space between ethnographic documentary and dream-like fable, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection charts the inexorable…
The Unholy is a jump scare-centric, heavy-handed horror slog with little atmosphere and even less mystery. Keeping the good old-fashioned huckster spirit alive, Sony’s genre imprint Screen Gems is releasing the new Catholic-tinged horror flick The Unholy just in time for Easter. It might’ve been…
Released in March of 1981, Michael Mann’s Thief is one of the great debut feature films, a fully-formed work that shows a young(ish) director firmly in command of the themes and aesthetic proclivities that would reverberate throughout a now almost 50-year career. Having found…
The Vault offers plenty of slick, heisty fun, but is hampered a bit by some unfortunate, charisma-sucking casting choices. Best known as the writer and director of three of the four films in the found-footage horror series REC, Jaume Balagueró makes a huge leap in…
The Devil Below is unfortunately hamstrung by its shoestring budget and liberal cribbing of better horror properties. Being a horror fan is sometimes like taking a leap of faith, willingly subjecting oneself to reams of cheap, bottom-of-the-barrel monstrosities while desperately digging for that elusive diamond…
