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The Substance opens with its simplest, most natural image: a raw chicken’s egg, the yolk yellow and dewy, lying flat on a white background. A long needle full of an unnaturally green fluid enters the frame and is injected…
Birthed during the cultural thaw that immediately followed the end of the Franco dictatorship, Basque writer-director and designer Iván Zulueta's 1979 feature Arrebato erupts like a massive discharge of so much repressed anxiety and despair.
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BY LAURA KERN | Month 00, 2021
Beast is a lot of movies in one package - fractured fairy tale, belated-coming-of-age story, psychological drama, regional horror film - but above all it's a calling card for its leading lady, Jessie Buckley.
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BY STEVEN MEARS | Month 00, 2021
In what could be the fastest-resulting rape revenge movie, a drunken lout brutally forces himself on Ida, the young woman who doesn't return his affections, during a party over Labor Day.
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BY LAURA KERN | Month 00, 2021
Beast is a lot of movies in one package - fractured fairy tale, belated-coming-of-age story, psychological drama, regional horror film - but above all it's a calling card for its leading lady, Jessie Buckley.
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BY STEVEN MEARS | Month 00, 2021
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 had been developing a premise involving the spread...
BY LAURA KERN | March 15, 2024
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 erupts like a massive discharge of so much repressed anxiety and desire.
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | October 31, 2021
Lately, the art of crafting a subtle and captivating movie trailer feels lost. But the official trailer for Barbarian not only grabs your attention, it also manages to reveal the film’s critique of gender dynamics while keeping the main story line hidden from view.
BY KATIE SMALL | October 3, 2022
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...
BY LAURA KERN | August 18, 2023
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...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | April 15, 2024
One of the most revelatory film experiences of my childhood was watching Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat with my grandparents when I was 10. I can’t remember the exact circumstances—I believe it ran on PBS some lonesome Friday...
BY WILLIAM BOYLE | June 9, 2023
Set in the mist-shrouded woods of Upper Austria in the 18th century, the latest film from writer/director duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala opens with a prelude depicting a crime...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | June 28, 2024
There is a lot of misdirection in David Prior’s ambitious, scary, and exhilaratingly convoluted The Empty Man. For its first 20 minutes it plays like lost-in-the-wilderness adventure horror, following a group of American friends...
BY MICHAEL KORESKY | October 31, 2021
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?
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | March 28, 2023
The TV is always on in Fatal Pulse, the most recent release from underground horror legend Damon Packard. Set in 1991, Packard’s 2018 film is drenched in pinkish-bluish gel lighting, a movie-world glow...
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BY CHLOE LIZOTTE | October 31, 2021
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.
BY LAURA KERN | March 29, 2024
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. Set in a small French town nestled within a mountain...
BY MARGARET BARTON-FUMO | May 18, 2023
Marriage and remarriage have forever been prominent motifs in the comedy genre. But with matrimonial success rates not exactly encouraging in much of the world, and divorce illegal in the Philippines...
BY LAURA KERN | March 14, 2022
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...
BY MARGARET BARTON-FUMO | February 10, 2023
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.
BY LAURA KERN | May 25, 2023
As The Innocents opens, a family of four are in the car headed to a new home. In the back seat sit two sisters: the lightly freckled Ida (Rakel Lenora Fløttum), her intense stare much older...
BY LAURA KERN | May 13, 2022
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...
BY LAURA KERN | January 13, 2023
Drawing inspiration from the special bleary-eyed ambiance of vintage witching-hour television, this found-footage curio from Australia’s...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | March 22, 2024
With his cold, enigmatic handsomeness and piercing blue eyes, Ralph Fiennes was meant for villainy. His magnetic portrayal of the execrable Nazi butcher Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List...
BY LAURA KERN | November 18, 2022
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...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | February 16, 2024
Nanny begins with Aisha (Anna Diop) asleep. Shadows, undulations, and a spreading dampness affect her bedclothes, while a spider makes an entrance just as Aisha wakes with a start.
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | November 21, 2022
From its opening image of ocean waves stuttering slowly behind a sheet of steely rain to its final vista of human detritus turned into...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | December 9, 2022
In spite of its title, Irish director Damian McCarthy’s latest film Oddity is more familiar than strange—a classic whodunit couched in a haunted-house story with a touch of Gothic...
BY MARGARET BARTON-FUMO | July 19, 2024
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...
BY VIOLET LUCCA | October 8, 2023
Clocking in at a swift 87 minutes, Andrew Cumming’s feature debut is a slick, beautiful genre piece best suited for the big screen. Partially reminiscent of Jean-Jacques Annaud’s...
BY MARGARET BARTON-FUMO | February 9, 2024
This past March, X, Ti West’s gleefully raunchy hybrid of two late-’70s subgenres (farmhouse horror and farmer’s-daughter porn), overachieved in four meaningful ways.
BY STEVEN MEARS | September 19, 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.
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | March 1, 2022
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...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | December 8, 2023
I first watched Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms months ago upon its Canadian release, and it was with no shortage of dread that I sat down to watch it again in preparation...
BY MICHAEL KRAS | September 6, 2024
Sweeping across centuries and continents to track the Orlando-like incarnations of its titular barbarian, French writer/director...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | January 30, 2024
An intriguing slice of Gothic psychological horror, She Will follows Veronica Ghent, an aging, high-maintenance, pill-popping ex–movie star recovering from...
BY KATIE SMALL | July 19, 2022
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...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | February 2, 2023
The English title of Christian Tafdrup’s third feature initially reads as a strategy to draw horror fans, a pleading form of genre assurance that the film’s anodyne original Danish title, Gæsterne...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | September 12, 2022
When Paul Vecchiali passed away early this year at the age of 92, he left behind a prolific legacy of films. An established director and the founder of the progressive production company...
BY MARGARET BARTON-FUMO | November 15, 2023
The toxicity of the male gaze has rarely been depicted on-screen with such chilling intensity as in Chloe Okuno’s debut feature Watcher. A refreshing take on the apartment thriller genre...
BY YONCA TALU | June 24, 2022
In late 2001, my girlfriend and I moved from New York to Austin, Texas. We had some friends who’d recently gone down there and we’d never been away from New York.
BY WILLIAM BOYLE | October 31, 2021
I haven’t seen Jane Schoenbrun’s first feature, a 2018 documentary entitled A Self-Induced Hallucination.
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | April 20, 2022
The enduring allure of Southern Gothic seems inextricable from the biblical entropy that haunts its storytelling, segregating it from the vagaries of time and culture wars like an oppressively...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | August 8, 2022
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.
BY MARGARET BARTON-FUMO | October 30, 2023
Stories told within the framework of family drama can sometimes resemble folklore—digressive, dark, suspiciously elliptical, patent fabrications that only bear hints of an ancient...
BY VIOLET LUCCA | March 25, 2022
The enduring allure of Southern Gothic seems inextricable from the biblical entropy that haunts its storytelling, segregating it from the vagaries of time and culture wars like an oppressively...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | August 8, 2022
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.
BY MARGARET BARTON-FUMO | October 30, 2023
Stories told within the framework of family drama can sometimes resemble folklore—digressive, dark, suspiciously elliptical, patent fabrications that only bear hints of an ancient truth that has since been lost to time. These two similar, alternately revealing and bewildering genres contain stories...
BY VIOLET LUCCA | March 25, 2022