It feels like many horror films in recent years begin and end in the pitch meeting. A kooky premise is introduced, funding is secured, and…
In this dispatch: Unholy Night…
For introverts and the unaccomplished, the greatest threat looming over every family gathering isn’t the unlikely prospect of mass violence, but an all too conscious…
It’s all too easy to feel at home in Casey Walker’s Home Bodies. Red (Emma Ho) and Blue (Ian Ho) have lived all their days in…
Akira Nagai’s Suzuki=Bakudan is a police procedural in which nearly every consequential movement begins with a man sitting at a table. Tagosaku Suzuki (Jiro Sato),…
Canadian perversion has always held a firm grip on our self-narrativization, the violent alienation of our national identities always sought after in reconciliation. Most often,…
There is something about horror maestro Takashi Shimizu’s The Mouths that feels as foundational as myth. The film’s premise is simple enough: a group of university-aged…
In this dispatch: Colony, Someone\’s…
Third verse, same as the first. Yeon Sang-ho’s 2016 rage-zombie opus Train to Busan was a breakout it, largely because of its relentless pace and…
At best, Wiebke von Carolsfeld’s Someone’s Daughter can be described as well-intentioned. Critically, however, it is existentially foolhardy and morally naive. Carrying a juvenile sort…
In Mark H. Rapaport’s Godhead, the world would seem to start and end between the walls of the church. In fact, this specific church commands…
Kasper Kalle’s No Rest for the Wicked is, on the face of it, dark and grim; apt, for a vampire horror with Gothic sensibilities. The film,…
Corpus opens tantalizingly, with a modeling session in which apparently inexperienced Wren (Nuha Jes Izman) is being photographed by veteran Billie (Lily Cowles). This being…
Watching Peter Hengl’s mid-length film The Fated Hour feels like handling a delicate porcelain doll: a precious encounter with a time-worn magic. The film, commissioned…
In this dispatch: Our Effed Up World…
Australian writer-director Alice Maio Mackay is not quite 22 years old, and now has seven feature-length productions under her belt. But there’s often a downside…
Over 40 years and as many movies into his career, Kiyoshi Kurosawa has finally made his first samurai film. Maybe it was the looming shadow…
The following statement about Alan Resnick’s first feature, Dance Freak, can easily be misconstrued as a fault on the film, an accusation of artistic counterfeit.…
Hanna Bergholm’s second feature has had two lives. At its world premiere in the Berlinale competition, Nightborn was generally considered a low point in an…
In Los Vampires, director Craig Mitchell draws on the parallel production of Universal’s two 1931 Dracula films, then gradually lets that industrial history go magnificently…
Latvian cinema, and especially animation, has been under either a spotlight or a microscope, depending on the vantage point, since Flow took home the country’s…