It’s perhaps too easy to dismiss a film as heavily aestheticized and intentionally non-narrative as Jonathan Rosado’s Matador Bolero for prioritizing style over substance. The…
Ah, another installment in the Times Square chronicles for this critic, and this time, a film truly worthy of such an environment — meaning, it’s…
Passenger starts with a prayer. “Carry me safely to my destined place, like you carried Christ in your close embrace,” ends the prayer to St.…
Saccharine was inevitable. In the Western world, there’s never been a worse time to have a body. Navigating the Internet is an exercise in polarity…
To fully appreciate — or even comprehend — a project like Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway: The Sorcery of Nymph Circe would require extensive foreknowledge of…
A monkey’s paw-inspired horror film that’s not-so-secretly about the loss of free will and specifically women being subjugated by their partners, Obsession — from 26-year-old…
When Affection opens, our protagonist (Jessica Rothe) is facedown on a road. It would appear she’s been in a car wreck. She stands up, stumbles…
The world has changed a lot since The Collingswood Story pioneered Screenlife storytelling in 2002. Nickelback had the top single that year, mid-budget films still…
“From the mind of The RZA” and “presented” by Quentin Tarantino comes One Spoon of Chocolate. In the film, Shameik Moore plays a veteran, washed…
Horror continually mines the dark crevices between belief and skepticism. Explorations of witchcraft, folklore, and the paranormal are fertile grounds for character-building, so that a…
Although cinema is at its best when it gleefully breaks the rules, some operating procedures need to be in place when you embark upon an…
In 2018, Saudi Arabia opened its first movie theaters in more than three decades. Just a few short years later, production began on the $150…
It’s almost always fun when a movie hops genres, changing up the structure and tropes you thought it was operating under until you realize it…
Josh Heap’s City Wide Fever is the best kind of micro-budget, DIY indie film, one that doesn’t attempt to hide its poverty of means but leans into…
In the age of virality, who will remember the snuff film? 1978’s Faces of Death, a documentary-style gorefest, is the stuff of dorm-room legend. “They…
Kazuya Shiraishi’s Bushido is a fascinating clash of visual styles and familiar genre tropes rendered fresh via a strange, languid dramaturgy. Kakunoshin Yanagida (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi) is a…
Why 2025 was a year rich in films with purgatorial motifs — everything from Oliver Laxe’s Sirât to Alex Ullom’s It Ends — is a…
I watched two films from IFFR’s 2025 festival: one was The Last Dance, the smash hit Hong Kong family melodrama set in the world of…
The premise for Forbidden Fruits hints at escalating acts of witchcraft driven by an all-female coven, while marketing materials are quick to push the involvement…
If one recently saw Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, which featured Satanic cult members out to murder a young woman who was trying…
As of this writing, filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay turned 21 less than a week ago. She has also just premiered her sixth feature length film…