Li Xiaofeng’s Back to the Wharf begins with a tragic accident that escalates, shockingly, to murder. After high school student Song Hao (Zhou Zhengjie)…
Thanks to its quite odd pairing of collaborators, Sick is a movie awkwardly pulled in two directions at once. On the one hand, you…
From a certain angle, 2022 could be seen as the year of satire. There spectrum was vast, from the “high-brow,” like Ruben Östlund’s Palme…
It’s something of a fool’s errand to try to trace broad trends throughout a full festival lineup — most critics don’t see anywhere near…
Icelandic director Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s Beautiful Beings is a brutal yet abundantly tender coming-of-age tale that examines how intergenerational trauma mars the friendships that…
Premiering at the 2022 edition of the Cannes Film Festival and dropping into U.S. theaters in the autumn, Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO was a film…
Shot on location in New Mexico in early 2021, Pete Ohs’ Jethica is a kind of minimalist sunbaked noir that gradually transforms into something…
Even in the seemingly endless combinations and reconfigurations of tropes that make up horror B-movies, there occasionally needs to be some new input. Dusty…
When Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses was released in 2003 (following numerous distribution delays by its original producer Universal Studios due to objectionable…
A woman stands in the courtroom witness box, her face tensed, pained, and withdrawn, her hands clasping the railing before her, while the judge’s…
The past invades the future in Paul Owens’ Landlocked, a low-budget, minimalist horror drama that’s steeped in the nostalgic haze of VHS grain and…
“READ ME”: a visage lit in orange glow, hands, bodies, hands caressing bodies, the twinkling lights of a Christmas tree, the two words blinking mutely from…
While the ongoing Liam Neeson dad-action-movie concern has been producing ever more diminishing returns, over the last decade and change, just about nobody has…
Quoth Christine Choy, the Oscar-losing documentary filmmaker, notoriously candid NYU professor, and pseudo-subject of Violet Columbus and Ben Klein’s The Exiles: “You know, the…
What makes a great writer? Romantics and bookworms might wax poetic about unparalleled emotional insight or the fearless plumbing of the human condition, but…
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse is quite naked in its ambitions to become the next classic British Christmas special —…
In only a few short years, writer-director John Swab has churned out a handful of low-budget features that have rarely risen above the mantle…
The ’60s and ’70s were a highly politically-charged time for Italian cinema. The country’s neorealism movement chronicled working class lives in a post-WWII Italy — a…