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…
John Hyams’ new film Alone is a minor miracle. A terrifically tense thriller pared down to the barest essentials, it is survival horror in the…
La Llorona understands how to the tick the genre boxes but forgets to muster much in the way of actual horror. The horror genre has long…
Project Power keeps the maniac Neveldine/Taylor aesthetic alive and is another welcome Netflix foray into small-scale superhero entries. There’s a new designer drug on the streets…
There’s a saying which roughly states that the beginning of a story represents endless possibilities, while the rest of the narrative represents the closing off…
Yummy is exclusively the domain of 12-year-old boys, and a hard pass for everyone else. It’s hard to imagine anyone clamoring for more zombie content these…
It’s a bad sign that the only person attempting anything in The Tax Collector is also delivering a racist caricature as performance. David Ayer isn’t…
Pedro Costa has long been celebrated for his loose Fontainhas trilogy, a series of docu-fiction hybrids made in collaboration with residents of the former Lisbon…
She Dies Tomorrow is a fever-dreamy reflection of modern existential anxieties. Rodney Ascher’s 2015 documentary The Nightmare follows multiple subjects that have experienced bouts of sleep paralysis,…
Grace Glowicki shows promise with Tito, but the film is ultimately little more than a strange trifle. Grace Glowicki’s Tito is the kind of strange,…
The Rental is a serviceable if predictable thriller, but immediately situates Dave as the better director of the Franco brothers. Dave Franco must have taken a…
Kiyoshi Kurosawa has mostly veered away from the kind of oblique horror films that made his international reputation back in the late 90s and early…
Roar begins with a vertiginously disorienting prologue, as a manic handheld camera frantically searches a room before pushing into an extreme close-up of a frightened,…
The Old Guard navigates familiar genre terrain but with enough punch to put the hetero white male actioner ethos on notice. Every big-budget action flick…
The summer of 1996 saw the release of three huge blockbusters that would in one way or another influence the next 20 odd years of…
Aviva has the distinct feel a Personal™ film, and one that mistakes gimmickry for depth at every turn. Boaz Yakin has had a bizarre career,…
Olivier Assayas produced a stunningly idiosyncratic series of works in the 2010s, even by his typically eclectic standards. From the mammoth Carlos to the autobiographical Something in…
It’s perhaps presumptuous, a little reductive even, to speak of an artist’s filmography as movements or periods, particularly when they are still making new, vital…
Given his relative renown amongst a certain type of adventurous, festival-savvy cinephile, interviews with Tsai Ming-liang tend to focus on either the ‘slowness’ of his…
Speaking in 2008 of what was then his most recent feature, 2006’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, Tsai Ming-liang said: “I did not want…