1975 was a pivotal year for actress Delphine Seyrig. In addition to work with the radical feminist collective Les Insoumises, alongside director Carole Roussopoulos, she departed from working with popular auteurs of the day, like Buñuel and Resnais, to instead release a trio of…
For the Sake of Vicious doesn’t reinvent anything, but is a lean, nasty thriller that doubles as a remarkable calling card for the directing duo. Writer-directors Gabriel Carrer and Reese Evensehen are no strangers to the DIY Canadian horror scene, each having delivered a…
Vanquish is bad, bizarrely so, but it’s at least not boring in its own dumpster fire way. After a few hits as a writer, including Midnight Run, George Gallo has spent his career “directing” movies that seem suspiciously fake. Exhibit A: last year he…
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…
IWOW is a work of pure hubris and self-aggrandizement, entirely devoid of the humanity that has informed Allah’s previous works. Over the course of his career, New York-based director Khalik Allah’s work has been suffused with an over-powering sense of the place he calls home…
There’s a perverse gothic sex comedy located somewhere in Jakob’s Wife, but it’s buried under reams of flat, deadening horror comedy. The work that made Barbara Crampton an icon is the work she did with Stuart Gordon in outre horror pictures, where she was used as…
Voyagers is a shallow, bland, and empty-headed space-set riff of Lord of the Flies that fails to choose either heady futurism or sci-fi eroticism. It’s not a great sign that even attempting a description of Neil Burger’s banal Voyagers is a bit of a…
Wheatley’s latest both builds and holds tension effectively, harnessing the director’s penchant for psychedelia and bruising horror to brutal effect. When Martin remarks at the wonder of being out of the house for the first time in four months, Alma, his guide into the…
Gunda is an empty, exploitative aesthetic exercise that that has no ideas to speak of. If nothing else — and it truly offers little else — Viktor Kosakovskiy’s Gunda serves as a handy catalogue of contemporary film-festival affectation. Although it nominally concerns the lives of…
Night in Paradise scans like any number of slow-burn gangster flicks, but suffers for lack of originality in both its action and drama. Park Hoon-jung’s Night in Paradise does little to differentiate itself from other gangster movies, especially others made in Korea like Park’s…