Festivals Reviews
Camera Japan Rotterdam 2025 Review: HOW DARE YOU?
The Netherlands have their very own Japanese Film Festival. It's called Camera Japan and is held every year in Rotterdam and Amsterdam. This year, the festival opened with a treat: Korean-Japanese director O Mipo's Futsū no Kodomo, which translates literally...
Morelia 2025 Review: LA GLORIA, Texas Rancher Swept Up in Immigration Crisis
David Morse, Jaklyn Bejarano and Bill Heck star in J.T. Walker's film.
Toronto After Dark 2025 Review: SISU: ROAD TO REVENGE Really Really Really Loves Blowing Up Commies
After the epic Western-Thunderdome Nazi-killing smorgasbord that was Sisu, Finnish director Jalmari Helander returns to his large northern Europe canvas for another round of battle with Finland’s enemies. This time, it's in the key of Mad Max: Fury Road, against an...
Toronto After Dark 2025 Short Film Short Review: CLOWN SONG Is A Banger
The sinister clown is a timeless trope of cinema and pulp horror and real life - from David Lynch to Rob Zombie, Álex de la Iglesia to Bobcat Goldthwait, and Stephen King to John Wayne Gacy. Taking the ever-loving piss...
Brooklyn Horror 2025 Review: CAMP, Avalon Fast's Dreamy, Spellbound-by-Grief Sophomore Feature
Grief clings to us like smoke; no matter how far we walk, its scent lingers. Emily (Zola Grimmer) knows this too well. At 16, she struck and killed a young girl who ran in front of her car. Years later,...
Toronto After Dark 2025 Review: THE OCCUPANT OF THE ROOM, Chills and Melancholy in The Swiss Alps
Seen wandering through the grim fog and pale moonlit wilderness of the Swiss Alps as a tiny speck among the trees and rocks, a man (Don McKellar) reaches his isolated hotel destination only to find there are no rooms available...
Toronto After Dark 2025 Review: PRIMATE, A Lean and Mean Creature Feature
“Who keeps a chimpanzee as a pet?” muses an unsuspecting, blandly attractive 20-something party-boy, right before he has his face ripped off, quite graphically, for daring to ask such a question about the movie he has found himself in. First...
San Sebastian 2025 Review: REDOUBT, Measured, Poetic Study of Obsession, Isolation in Rural Sweden
Swedish filmmaker John Skoog reconstructs the true story of Karl-Göran Persson, a Cold War-era farm laborer who turned his home into a private fortress.
Serial Killer Brno 2025 Review: QUEEN OF FUCKING EVERYTHING, Finnish Darker Comedy Series, Taps into BREAKING BAD Territory with a Twist
Writer-director Tiina Lymi delivers a darker Finnish crime dramedy that examines the collapse of middle-class identity through the story of a real estate agent whose gradual descent into criminality exposes the moral fragility beneath social respectability.
New York 2025 Review: THE SECRET AGENT, Stylish, Inventive Political Thriller on the Intricacies of Historical Memory
Kleber Mendonça Filho's epic stars Wagner Moura.
New York 2025 Review: TWO PROSECUTORS, Hell Is Legal Evil
Sergei Loznitsa's film stars Alexander Kuznetsov.
Busan 2025 Review: Hypnotic Meta-Mystery BLACK RABBIT, WHITE RABBIT Bends Time, Space and Genres in Quantum Storytelling
Black Rabbit, White Rabbit, Tajikistan's official submission for the 2025 Academy Awards, marks the Iranian filmmaker's first international production and an ambitious continuation of his narrative recursion, cinematic illusion.
New York 2025 Review: IS THIS THING ON?, Bradley Cooper Adapts an Old Joke About the Lengths Men Can Go to Avoid Therapy
Will Arnett and Laura Dern star.
Vlissingen 2025 Review: HOW TO MAKE A KILLING Is A Fun Look At Corruption
Vlissingen's Film by the Sea Festival always has a special section for French films, and one of the funniest this year was Franck Dubosc's criminal caper Un Ours Dans le Jura. This literally translates to "A Bear in the Jura",...
New York 2025 Review: A PRIVATE LIFE, The Adventures of an American Psychiatrist in France
Jodie Foster stars (speaking French) in Rebecca Zlotowski's murder mystery.
New York 2025 Review: JAY KELLY, Underwhelming Tale of the Existential Woes of Stardom
George Clooney stars, with Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup, Riley Keough, and Emily Mortimer, who wrote the script with director Noah Baumbach.
Vlissingen 2025 Review: THE TASTERS
In December 2012, an interview with the then 95-year-old Margot Wölk netted the interviewer a remarkable story. Margot Wölk revealed she had been a food taster for Adolf Hitler during the second world war, whenever he visited his Eastern Headquarters...
New York 2025 Review: Bi Gan's RESURRECTION Rethinks Cinema History
With just his first two features, Bi Gan won a place in world cinema. Kaili Blues and Long Day's Journey into Night grabbed attention more for Bi's visual style than for what the movies were saying. With Resurrection, the writer...
New York 2025 Review: SOUND OF FALLING, Girls, Interrupted
Mascha Schilinski’s second feature, Sound of Falling, which premiered at Cannes earlier this year, where it won the Jury Prize, is one of those films, the charm of which is very hard to articulate clearly to an unsuspecting potential viewer...
New York 2025 Review: MIROIRS NO. 3, Haunted By the Idea of a Perfect Family
Paula Beer stars in Christian Petzold's new film. As the title suggests, everything is a reflection of what should have been. It's the idea of a perfect family that haunts his characters.
