As InRO’s own Jake Tropila makes note of in his recent piece on the killer-shark-in-a-cave-movie The Devil’s Mouth, “shark movies have been seemingly omnipresent all year”;…
Released in 2012, Leung Lok-man & Sunny Luk Kim-Ching’s Cold War became a gargantuan commercial smash and critical success, breaking domestic box office records and…
There’s an old axiom about how you can’t manufacture a cult favorite, and instead the audience has to find it and organically turn it into…
Makoto Nagahisa’s Burn walks a very fine line, attempting to infuse a miserabilist, post-neo-realist tale of urban destitution with a candy-colored pop aesthetic while putting us…
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…
William Kaufman makes movies like someone who saw the centerpiece bank shootout in Michael Mann’s Heat and internalized every beat of it, determined to bring new heights…
With her first feature since 2019’s Black Christmas remake, Sophia Takal’s Act One returns to some of the same obsessions and fascinations as 2016’s Always Shine, her breakthrough second film…
A noted director of shorts, Greek filmmaker Konstantina Kotzamani makes her feature debut with Titanic Ocean, a purposefully opaque but frustratingly vague coming-of-age story that attempts to…
In 2020, Kevin B. Lee and Lého Galibert-Laîné released Bottled Songs 1-4, an epistolary essay film constructed via Lee’s desktop documentary method. Divvied up into…
In an old interview with David Ehrlich, filmmaker and critic Kent Jones recalls a conversation with Arnaud Desplechin in which the great French director told…
Critic Filipe Furtado recently wrote a piece extolling the virtues of low-budget genre filmmaking, emphasizing how certain action specialists tend to compensate for a lack…
Josh Heap’s City Wide Fever is the best kind of micro-budget, DIY indie film, one that doesn’t attempt to hide its poverty of means but leans into…
Clemente Castor’s Cold Metal is a difficult film to wrap one’s head around. It’s a small-scale, profoundly opaque object that rejects traditional narrative in favor…
Kazuya Shiraishi’s Bushido is a fascinating clash of visual styles and familiar genre tropes rendered fresh via a strange, languid dramaturgy. Kakunoshin Yanagida (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi) is a…
As of this writing, filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay turned 21 less than a week ago. She has also just premiered her sixth feature length film…
Writer-director-actress Grace Glowicki hasn’t yet ascended to the same level of indie prestige as Kate Lyn Sheil, Deragh Campbell, or (now mainstream power player) Greta…
Valerie Donzelli’s At Work has proven divisive since its festival premiere last year; a film about an artist’s existential ennui while searching for his authentic…
Richard Fleischer’s 1952 thriller The Narrow Margin is a tough, taut little gem, a masterclass in narrative economy and tight, claustrophobic mise-en-scène. Clocking in at barely…
It’s no secret that adapting video games into movies has a shockingly low success rate; adapting any medium to another has its own unique difficulties,…
Filmmaking duo Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli took the 2020 TIFF Midnight Madness crowd by storm with their stunning debut feature Violation, an extremely dark,…
Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan’s 2023 no-budget feature New Strains was one of the few films interested in documenting the psychological reality of living through…