As a filmmaking duo, directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead have left a lasting impression in carving out their own little niche of low-fi sci-fi…
Director Alexandre Aja’s latest film, Never Let Go, occupies a deliberately liminal space. Its threadbare plot suggests a post-apocalyptic near future, but its central family…
After several festival dates in 2023, Simon Barrett and E.L. Katz’s Azrael seemed to fall off the face of the Earth. Given the current state…
“Someone’s inside.” These two words, uttered with ominous clarity, spur Jason Yu’s invigorating debut, Sleep, into malevolent and mysterious somnolence; for in the world of…
Zoya Lowe (Mary-Louise Parker) has a problem, but it might be sort of a familiar one, which is a little symptomatic of just what’s ailing…
Don’t look now, but there’s a new action comedy about a hitman! No one should be surprised, as it one of them seems to come…
Tamil star Dhanush has worked with a bounty of the industry’s most daring artists: Vetrimaaran, Karthik Subbaraj, not to mention his brother Selvaraghavan, always as…
At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Studio Ghibli was presented with an Honorary Palme d’Or — the very first time in the festival’s history that…
Botox is everywhere, and Ozempic will follow. To voluntarily place a needle in one’s skin is no longer an image of deviancy, but one of…
Not very long ago, robots and AIs, automatons and droids — either as friendly or malignant entities — belonged to a far unknown future (remember…
Grief is a challenging experience to depict in any medium due to its deeply subjective nature and the presentational challenges this presents. Whether it’s the…
For people of a certain age, author Joe R. Lansdale will likely always be best known as the writer of some of the best Jonah…
In 2002, Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival to a storm of controversy, eclipsed — for better or worse —…
From HAL’s unrelenting utilitarianism to Demon Seed’s Proteus longing for physical form beyond its servers to Margeaux’s desire to understand humans completely by murdering them…
2024 has been a good year for nostalgia-driven genre cinema so far. Especially with the widespread popularity of films like I Saw the TV Glow…
On the heels of this past spring’s I.S.S., the summer season brings us another lower-budget, space-bound indie thriller, Slingshot, starring Casey Affleck in what’s basically…
Two British women, one affluent and childless, the other impoverished and seven months pregnant with a brood already at home, reconnect after decades, having once…
For its first 10 to 15 minutes, Audrey Cummings’ reversionistic feminist Western Place of Bones proves to be surprisingly perplexing. A lot of this initial…
“Starting positions” was the ominous refrain Dale Cooper’s evil doppelgänger used, in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, during an arm wrestling showdown; something about…
Marx’s vampires and specters; the oil crisis, Vietnam War, and industrializing slaughterhouses as the background for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; the commodification of the spectacularly…