Blackout
The premise, like the ambient air of fatalism, owes as much to film noir as it does horror. A man wakes in a place he can’t remember arriving at, his body bearing the ravages of some misadventure, his memories a dense fog yielding no clues save a lingering sense of grave culpability.
Femme
Done right, a movie can conjure feelings you typically wouldn’t have—or, in the case of many dark genre works, ones you absolutely don’t want. The powerhouse Femme brings out the whole artillery of emotions.
Late Night with the Devil
Drawing inspiration from the special bleary-eyed ambiance of vintage witching-hour television, this found-footage curio from Australia’s fraternal writing/directing duo Cameron and Colin Cairnes (who also edit here) considers the Faustian bargain implicit in the ruthless pursuit of household-name celebrity status.
The Animal Kingdom
With their numbing sameness, dystopian or end-of-world movie scenarios tend to grow tiresome, and even intolerable now that we have a four-year reference point for how true to life that stasis can be. Pre-COVID, French writer/director Thomas Cailley had been developing a premise involving the spread of a new kind of virus, and as fate would have it, world events gave his ideas new relevancy.
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.
Out of Darkness
Clocking in at a swift 87 minutes, Andrew Cumming’s feature debut is a slick, beautiful genre piece best suited for the big screen.
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…
The Strangler
When Paul Vecchiali passed away early this year at the age of 92, he left behind a prolific legacy of films.
When Evil Lurks
The title of Demián Rugna’s new horror opus is something of a misnomer: moving at a swift pace over the course of 99 minutes, When Evil Lurks lurches right into motion rather than lurks.