Monolith
A public case of professional disgrace has driven a journalist (Lily Sullivan) to hide out at her parents’ vacant, sprawling country home. But the young woman, credited simply as “the interviewer”—we learn her subjects’ names but never her own—refuses to be defeated.
She Is Conann
Sweeping across centuries and continents to track the Orlando-like incarnations of its titular barbarian, French writer/director Bertrand Mandico extravagantly extrapolates on the themes and situation of his 2023 short film Rainer, a Vicious Dog in a Skull Valley with this hallucinatory existential epic about survival in a world of relentless brutality and failed attempts at civilization.
Poor Things
A philosophically infused coming-of-age tale and Victorian-era fantastical travelogue with overt nods to both Frankenstein and The Island of Dr. Moreau, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things is marked by flamboyance, plottiness, and general abundance…
Gold Metal
The directorial debut of veteran character actor Charles Martin Smith, Trick or Treat (1986), tells a story grounded in rites, rituals, and rock.
The Velvet Vampire
It was Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) that inspired Stephanie Rothman to make movies. She studied filmmaking at the University of Southern California, became the first woman to be awarded a Directors Guild of America fellowship, and went on to work as a valued assistant for exploitation titan Roger Corman (also, as it happens, a big Bergman fan).
The Haunting
The question of possession looms over The Haunting (1963), with regards to both Hill House, the labyrinthine Victorian mansion in which most of the action takes place, and the film’s story, an adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s now-canonical 1959 Gothic The Haunting of Hill House that’s remarkably faithful in plot, if not in spirit.
The Changeling
For all the freaky poltergeist activity and vivid visions of murder to come, The Changeling (1980) dispatches its most abysmal horrors in its opening minutes, when its protagonist witnesses the deaths of his wife and child under the wheels of a truck, in the sort of scene that inevitably impacts older viewers more profoundly than younger ones.
Onibaba
The opening images of Kaneto Shindo’s exquisite, dread-drenched, medieval Japan–set Onibaba (1964) are overlaid with telegraphic fragments of text: “THE HOLE. DEEP AND DARK…”
The Vanishing
Two young lovers travel by car through a foreign country. They quarrel, then make up, pledging their love by burying a pair of coins beneath a tree. Then, at a petrol station through which thousands pass daily, the woman vanishes.
Enys Men
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 the volunteer, is the island’s sole inhabitant. Or is she?