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…
Setting one’s low-budget genre film in a single setting is a time-honored tradition, a money-saving maneuver that makes for a simple calling-card exercise but which…
What proves fascinating about horror beyond its jumps and scares is a creeping sense of unknowability, a sense which violates our morals as much as…
Celebrated as the long-awaited and much-anticipated anime adaptation of Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s novel and the subsequent manga, Kenichiro Akimoto’s All You Need is Kill will nevertheless…
Much like two recent films by major Japanese horror auteurs — Takashi Shimizu’s Sana (2023) and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Chime (2024) — South Korean filmmaker Kim…
If anyone can make a great Cancel Culture movie, it would have to be Takashi Miike, right? Sham is based on a true story, a…
Brock Bodell’s directorial debut, Hellcat, begins with a wounded and frantic woman, Lena (Dakota Gorman), waking up in a moving camper trailer. A drawling voice…
In a world completely in thrall to corporate IP and mega-budget computerized imperialist fantasies, we should be eternally grateful to festivals like Fantasia for platforming…
The shadow of Alex Honnold looms large. As the most famous rock climber in the world, and the undeniable face of the sport to those…
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…
It all begins as a ghost story in Portuguese filmmaker João Rosas’ feature debut The Luminous Life. Said ghost is a nameless woman who, as…
As Terrestrial opens, we meet Allen (Jermaine Fowler), a successful sci-fi writer who is of late enjoying a massive career upswing as his work has…
Attention: this one’s for all the Obayashi heads out there. Daigo Matsui’s Rewrite begins in a place we know well: a high school girl named…
It’s not surprising that Fantasia organizers for the festival’s 2025 edition couldn’t help but highlight how Dog of God follows last year’s triumph of Flow,…
A young man named Ibuki (played by multi-hyphenate star Raul), styled as a “bad boy” because of, presumably, his dyed-blonde hair and dangling earrings, is…
In Michael Shanks’ body-horror-comedy Together, the recently-engaged but longtime-dating couple of Millie and Tim (played by real-life spouses and frequent creative collaborators Alison Brie and…
Bel Ami is a curious and often compelling entry in the canon of queer Chinese cinema — one that blends stylized melancholy with pointed political…
Director Sun-young Chun’s feature debut, A Girl with Closed Eyes, begins with a deceptively simple setup: a woman named In-seon (Minha Kim) shoots and kills…
An overwhelming sense of familiarity clings to Mikhail Red’s Lilim, which liberally deploys Gothic and folk horror tropes without grasping their inherent power. The film…
Dogs occupy a unique, almost sacred, space in our lives. They are not technically human, yet they embody qualities — loyalty, affection, intelligence — that…
Writer-director Jun Li received a degree in journalism from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and in his self-referential film Queerpanorama, the journalistic impulse is…