The Origin of Evil

It’s often said that you can pick your friends but not your family. Yet in an age of mass communication, it’s never been easier to track down an absentee dad or quietly unfriend a despicable relative on Facebook.

birth/rebirth

The influence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein on motion pictures can be traced back to the early years of cinema, and reanimating the dead has since grown into one of horror’s most beloved staples. Laura Moss’s exquisite feature debut is the latest homage to the timeless mad-scientist/monster morality tale.

Brooklyn 45

One of the most revelatory film experiences of my childhood was watching Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat with my grandparents when I was 10.

Influencer

The word alone induces twinges of dread and disgust: “influencer,” along with its evil siblings “vlogger,” “social media personality,” “YouTuber,” and “TikTok sensation,” have made our depreciating society even grimmer.

The Five Devils

A witchy tale of time travel, young love and sporty women, Léa Mysius’s sophomore feature is an entrancing puzzle film anchored by compelling performances.

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?

Huesera: The Bone Woman

Often considered a sacred rite of passage, pregnancy is an aspirational, much-coveted physical state for women the world over. For many, it’s the most significant time of their life…

Skinamarink

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 in the gloom of otherwise benign images.

Jethica

A stalker situation gone berserk; a cursed trailer home situated in the flat vastness of chilly, rural New Mexico; a provocative, post-coital admission of murder: Jethica would seem equipped for full-blooded horror if its wider ambitions weren’t so clearly apparent.

Nr. 10

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, Nr. 10 seems determined above all to enter and exit every scene in medias res.