Will Neil Marshall ever get his mojo back? After finding early success with a run of lean, mean, low-budget face-melters — Dog Soldiers and The Descent are still near perfect genre films — Marshall has floundered in both larger-budgeted efforts (a woe begotten Hellboy reboot) and cheap, uninspired DTV efforts (The Reckoning,…
In 2017, the avant-groove trio of John Medeski (keyboards), Billy Martin (percussions), and Chris Wood (bass) arrive at an old mountain-top mansion in the Catskills to record their first new album in seven years. With only their musical instruments in hand, and after their initial plan to record…
Ababooned There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of André Forcier, the writer-director of the new comedy Ababooned. But he is actually one of the grand old men of Québécois cinema, and this latest film is his sixteenth feature in a career that began in the early 1970s.…
The modern straight white male, as an ideal, is an emasculated species: living under cosmopolitan values with none of its urbane anachronisms, he knows his place, recognizes his privileges, and respects — to quote his deity and muse, Kamala Harris — “the context of all in which [he…
There must be some sort of an unwritten connection between the warmth of summer and the heat of one’s newfound emotions, the ripeness in the air and the maturation of sensations. It’s a special seasonal shift, especially for the youth who so often realize their sensual and corporeal…
As ever, Fantasia’s Retro lineup offered a wealth of riches this year, from the familiar titles to the utterly unexpected. First and foremost is, of course, the run of Hong Kong classics screened, mostly on 35mm, in partnership with The Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office. A Chinese…
While visiting Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with her fiancé, a woman finds herself enchanted — not just with the beautiful views of the Tetons, but with a fishing guide who lives out of his car. If that sounds like a Mad Libs plot for a new Hallmark movie, what…
The Paragon 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 or Love Lies Bleeding, aesthetic homages to older, bygone media formats or revisionist interpretations or appropriations of those seem to be…
Have you ever watched one of Roland Emmerich’s appreciably bonkers epics and thought to yourself: “What if this had way less action, looked even cheaper, was densely packed with interchangeable and barely sketched characters played by actors you don’t recognize, and was like 10 hours long?” If you…
How do you prove that you don’t speak a language? Especially when that language, English, is a tool of centuries-old oppression wielded by one of the largest global empires in history, and your mother tongue, Irish, is spoken by less than 10,000 people in a highly contested corner…
Cuckoo The first obvious parallel to Tilman Singer’s horror-thriller Cuckoo is The Shining. A family — Luis (Marton Csokas), the patriarch, Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), his teenage daughter, Beth (Jessica Henwick), the stepmom, and Alma (Mila Lieu), Beth’s young, mute daughter — has packed up not just from the…
The Code If nothing else, Eugene Kotlyarenko is a filmmaker dedicated to understanding how we live with technology, and his greatest strength is a willingness to confront how uncinematic this can be and to push himself to invent something new. He takes the mundanity of staring at our…
In her 2019 memoir, In the Eye of the Wild, French anthropologist Nastassja Martin grapples with the aftermath of a near-fatal bear attack in the Siberian wilderness, an attack which left her mutilated and also threw her life out of balance in a more philosophical and spiritual sense.…
Allan Dwan’s happenstance journey into Hollywood is marked by a myriad of right time-right place encounters that allowed the young engineer to become one of the first great directors in Tinseltown. He initially started script-writing as a way to make some extra cash, but was soon thrust into…
Like an oak presiding over what came before and what might follow, Kier-La Janisse’s documentary study Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (2021) roots folk horror to the forces that found the sub-genre while gesturing toward how the tradition keeps perpetuating. To watch the film in 2021, half-in and…
The Killers Between Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, the seemingly never-ending V/H/S franchise, and even Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year and is currently out in cinemas, anthology films are arguably having a moment. The appeal of such a…
Between Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, the seemingly never-ending V/H/S franchise, and even Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year and is currently out in cinemas, anthology films are arguably having a moment. The appeal of such a project is…
Norris Wong’s first feature film, My Prince Edward, was one of the better Hong Kong indie movies of recent years. It starred singer/actress Stephy Tang as a young woman caught between East and West, Hong Kong and China, one man and another. Wong avoided all the expected turns…
Where does a song come from? And how does it happen? In November 2021, driven back inside to obsess about air particles again thanks to NYC’s Omicron wave, home-viewed footage of Paul McCartney conjuring the riff to “Get Back” seemingly out of thin air became a kind of…
Without further context, one could be forgiven for conflating Skywalkers: A Love Story with yet another Star Wars spinoff. Donning the Jedi’s patronymic and draped with a subtitle reminiscent of a legacy franchise brewing its nostalgic strains, this documentary, directed by Jeff Zimbalist (with a co-director’s credit to…