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 the…
Saloum is an absolute blast, packed with pleasant genre surprises and announcing a major new filmmaker in Jean Luc Herbulot. Part of the joy of…
She Will offers plenty of appealing phantasmagoria, but skews too indulgent with its visual design and often upsets its rhythms with a need to preach. For…
Flux Gourmet has a few tasty morsels, but it mostly offers glimpses at the more adventurous filmmaker that Strickland used to be. The films of Peter…
Watcher stumbles into the territory of predictability that has sunk many a better horror-thriller before it. Horror inspired by the unique voyeurism of apartment-living and…
The Innocents thankfully forgoes any social commentary in favor of impressive horror atmosphere and a study of childhood’s central paradox. When the director of an…
Hatching is an intelligent, visceral film that avoids metaphor-heavy horror pitfalls and delivers an impressive creature feature. The coming-of-age horror film is a staple with good…
Barbarians is blunt-force cinema at its worst, beating viewers over the head with its shallow, pseudo-provocative gabble. Barbarians is a home-invasion thriller that desperately wants to…
A Banquet is atmospherically impressive for its first two acts, but doesn’t quite know how to stick the landing. The decision to eat or abstain…
Although it doesn’t quite stick the landing, See For Me is still a precise, no-frills genre exercise that makes the most of its limited budget and…
The Feast is a fine feature debut for Jones, building an effectively eerie tone and supporting it with lovely compositions and gnarly inserts. Lee Haven Jones’…
Demonic suggests a few novel, fascinating twists to the horror template, and then runs away from them as fast as it can. In the six years…
Settlers offers neither genre thrills nor any real interrogation of the material’s potentially rich subtext. Part sci-fi thriller, part western, part survivalist drama, Wyatt Rockefeller’s Settlers…
The Djinn offers plenty of playful throwback chills, but boasts eye-roll messaging and doesn’t quite know who its audience is. Anyone expecting the gore and camp…
Come True is an empty-headed, poorly-conceived horror flick that mistakes endless stylistic detail for substance. Anyone who has ever experienced night terrors can attest to the…
The Night hints at building nuance into its familiar template, but ultimately jumbles familiar genre tropes to no discernible end. It’s never a good look to…
Hunter Hunter begins as a simple look at a family living off-the-grid, but quickly develops into a gory thriller that isn’t for the faint of heart.…
Kindred doesn’t achieve much more than powering through a laundry list of tired indie horror film clichés. A studio releasing its seasonal horror offering one week…
Rent-a-Pal, the debut feature from writer-director-editor Jon Stevenson, is unrelentingly bleak, a 108-minute cringe-fest masquerading as a character study. Not that there is much to…
Centigrade doesn’t do much as a character-driven chamber piece, but it’s served well by an attention to detail and the ability to build genuine tension. In…
Sputnik is competently made but lacks the necessary suspense and horror to elevate it past mere adequacy. Here’s another sci-fi flick that plays like an extended…