JOSÉ TEODORO

is a freelance critic and playwright.

Drawing inspiration from the special bleary-eyed ambiance of vintage witching-hour television, this found-footage curio from Australia’s fraternal...

March 22, 2024

A public case of professional disgrace has driven a journalist (Lily Sullivan) to hide out at her parents’ vacant, sprawling country home.

February 16, 2024

It was Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) that inspired Stephanie Rothman to make movies. She studied filmmaking at the University...

February 12, 2024

Sweeping across centuries and continents to track the Orlando-like incarnations of its titular barbarian, French writer/director...

January 30, 2024

For all the freaky poltergeist activity and vivid visions of murder to come, The Changeling (1980) dispatches its most abysmal horrors in...

January 24, 2024

A philosophically infused coming-of-age tale and Victorian-era fantastical travelogue with overt nods to both Frankenstein and ...

December 8, 2023

Hard rock and teenage hardship abound in ’80s horror relic Trick or Treat, an eternally addictive depiction of hero worship gone crazy.

October 31, 2023

The question of possession looms over The Haunting (1963), with regards to both Hill House, the labyrinthine Victorian mansion in which most...

September 10, 2023

It is springtime 1973, and the days are bright on a small island off the coast of Cornwall. A horticulturist (Mary Woodvine), known only as...

March 28, 2023

A nurse leads a catatonic through an expanse of moonlit cane. They pass displays of sacrificed animals before encountering the towering...

March 17, 2023

We go to the movies to see ghosts, whether they be the likenesses of long-gone actors, objects, or edifices, or the suggestion of specters imprinted...

February 2, 2023

From its opening image of ocean waves stuttering slowly behind a sheet of steely rain to its final vista of human detritus turned into cosmic junk...

December 9, 2022

Nanny begins with Aisha (Anna Diop) asleep. Shadows, undulations, and a spreading dampness affect her bedclothes, while a spider makes...

November 21, 2022

The tale of an amateur entomologist (Eiji Okada) lured by seemingly amiable rural folk into a sand pit from which he is unable to escape...

October 31, 2022

The camera floats just a little behind and a little above the figure of a man running through Central Park. In this, Birth’s overture...

October 31, 2022

The English title of Christian Tafdrup’s third feature initially reads as a strategy to draw horror fans, a pleading form of genre...

September 12, 2022

The enduring allure of Southern Gothic seems inextricable from the biblical entropy that haunts its storytelling, segregating it from...

August 8, 2022

Cronenberg hallmarks may ripple through Crimes of the Future, but the director’s transcendent return offers fresh flavors of food for thought.

June 7, 2022

I haven’t seen Jane Schoenbrun’s first feature, a 2018 documentary entitled A Self-Induced Hallucination. The film’s IMDb page offers a teasingly terse synopsis: “It’s about the internet...

April 20, 2022

Brazilian writer-director Iuli Gerbase’s debut feature begins with the whole of humanity being forced indoors by a pervasive vapor as deadly as it is seemingly innocuous.

March 1, 2022

Produced during the cultural thaw that immediately followed the end of the Franco dictatorship, Basque writer-director and designer Iván Zulueta’s 1979 feature Arrebato (Rapture)...

October 31, 2021

Katie Small

is a writer, photographer, videographer, and cinephile living in Portland, Oregon.