Festivals: IFFR Reviews
Fantaspoa 2026 Review: IAI
About twenty-five years ago, Japan's special kind of horror suddenly spread over the world like a virus. This horror had none of the fun exuberance of slashers, none of the tongue-in-cheek references to popular culture, and none of the gorefests...
A MAGNIFICENT LIFE Review: It Shows One, Animated
Biopics aren't my favorite kind of film. The things a person has done are often more interesting than the person himself, and it is not often that you need to know the background story of the person, what motivated him....
Rotterdam 2026 Review: NO HIT WONDER Scores Quite A Few Hits
Crack jokes all you want about the concept of German comedy films, but they exists and are often quite good. Case in point: Florian Dietrich's comedy No Hit Wonder, which played at the International Film Festival Rotterdam this year and...
Rotterdam 2026 Review: GUNMAN Is One Shot That Hits
Festival people are the best. At the International Film Festival Rotterdam, a filmmaker I met for the first time almost immediately recommended I should watch Cris Tapia Marchiori's thriller Gatillero, released internationally as Gunman, and it turned out to be...
Rotterdam 2026 Review: PELELIU, GUERNICA OF PARADISE
Anime was well represented at the International Film Festival Rotterdam this year. The selection included Hosoda Mamoru's Scarlet (reviewed here), Aoki Yasuhiro's ChaO (reviewed here), and this peculiar one: Kuji Gorō's war drama Peleliu: Guernica of Paradise. Based on a...
Rotterdam 2026 Review: TEKENCHU, THE RITE OF THE NAHUALES, Beware Of The Were-Birds
Mexico has a rich tradition of genre films, both serious and outrageous, and that shouldn't be a surprise because the country has an incredible selection of mythologies and histories to pull inspiration from. Back in 2020, the Mexican director Carlos...
Rotterdam 2026 Review: I SWEAR Is The Ultimate Crowd Favorite
This year's winner of the Audience Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam is I Swear, Kirk Jones' biopic about John Davidson. To say it is a crowdpleaser is an understatement: from hundreds of votes, the film got a mean...
Rotterdam 2026 Review: FISH, FISTS AND AMBERGRIS Hits All Of Its Targets
The International Film Festival Rotterdam doesn't just do the no-budget debuts of beginning directors, it also allows glimpses of what is hot in other countries. This is the festival where we got introduced to the Korean classics of the past...
Rotterdam 2026 Review: BAZAAR (MURDER IN THE BUILDING), Funny Hitchcockian Shenanigans
Time flies when you're having fun, and that saying applies to the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Last Saturday there was the screening of the closing film already, the world première of Rémi Bezançon's Le Crime du 3e Étage, to be...
Rotterdam 2026 Review: MI AMOR
The International Film Festival Rotterdam is host to many beginning directors, but that doesn't mean there are no regular returning guests. Writer, director and actor Guillaume Nicloux has visited the festival several times in the past 30 years, and for...
Rotterdam 2026 Review: ROID, An Ode to the Bengali Landscape and Its Cinema
Director Mejbaur Rahman Sumon's evocative tale from the Bengali countryside about love and fate, echoing the freshness of Satyajit Ray's cinema.
Rotterdam 2026 Review: TALKING TO A STRANGER Shows A Grief, Scarier Than Ghosts
We have been fans of director Adrián García Bogliano ever since his films Cold Sweat (reviewed here) and Here Comes the Devil (reviewed here), so we consider it good news when a new film by him comes out. Yesterday, the...
Rotterdam 2026 Review: THE NIGHT Holds Horrors And Wonders
The International Film Festival Rotterdam has started its 2026 edition. And even though the festival slants towards arthouse as always, there are plenty of genre films to enjoy as well. Case in point: Paul Urkijo Alijo's Gaua a.k.a. The Night,...
Rotterdam 2025 Review: THREE DAYS OF FISH Proves You Can Never Go Home Again
Peter Hoogendoorn debuted very strongly almost ten years ago with Tussen 10 en 12 (Between 10 and 12), a rigidly structured movie set in a limited time-space. In it, a family one by one get told bad news by two...
Rotterdam 2025 Review: VIDEOHEAVEN, Alex Ross Perry's Juggernaut Essay About Video-stores
Alex Ross Perry's new film is a video-essay in the style of Thom Andersen's seminal Los Angeles Plays Itself, in that it focuses on a place and location, and explores this place solely through deep analysis of footage from films...
Rotterdam 2025 Review: MEMOIR OF A SNAIL Gets You, Pacing Be Damned
Back in 2009 we were treated to one of the best films ever made about autism, and it was, surprise surprise, an animated puppet feature. That was Mary and Max, directed by Adam Elliot, who had previously won an Academy...
Rotterdam 2025 Review: I'M STILL HERE Will Not Fade From Your Memory
In 1970, Brazil was suffering under a military dictatorship. Political opponents and critics were arrested, tortured and murdered. As much as 20,000 people were "disappeared" under the regime. One of them was Rubens Pavia, an architect who had been a...
Rotterdam 2025 Review: ACTS OF LOVE Attempts to Unearth the Repressed Past
Jeppe Rønde's family drama tackles memory, trauma, and transgression in a small New Age Christian community.
Rotterdam 2025 Review: FIUME O MORTE!, Playful Croatian Psychogeographic Docudrama About Nationalism
Igor Bezinović's hybrid docudrama tackles Gabriele D'Annunzio's 1919 occupation of Fiume, engaging locals in site-specific meta-textual reenactments.
Rotterdam 2025 Review: TRANSCENDING DIMENSIONS Sees Toshiaki Toyoda Play the Hits
In the Q&A after Transcending Dimensions, Toyoda mentioned that this might be his last feature film, as he felt like he transcended himself with this film. What does a transcendent Toyoda-film look like? As usually loud, violent and surreal,...
