Festivals Reviews
Tallinn 2025 Review: LIFELIKE Moves Beyond Coming-of-Age
Turkish director Ali Vatansever examines how a family shifts its dynamics as a terminal diagnosis intersects with caregiving, belief, and the virtual spaces that offer temporary escape.
Tallinn 2025 Review: SUNDAY NINTH Probes Memory, Estrangement, Blurred Line Between Fiction and Documentary
Kat Steppe's feature fiction debut examines the disintegration of memory and identity through a hybrid fiction-documentary lens, using the fractured relationship between two estranged brothers as its narrative anchor.
Tallinn 2025 Review: THINK OF ENGLAND Dramatizes Britain's Attempt to Boost Morale with State-Mandated Porn Films
Richard Hawkins' film moves from period workplace comedy, rooted in the absurdities of producing a pornographic film for the war effort, toward a psychological drama shaped by mounting instability.
Tallinn 2025 Review: BLINDSIGHT Retools the Amnesia Narrative Through Immersive Experience and Storytelling Rug Pulling
Adrian Sitaru's latest work employs first person immersion to build a narrative puzzle that shifts into the register of a 'Black Mirror' episode, revealing a film with far more layers than its early realism and family drama implied.
Tallinn 2025 Review: FATHER, Immersive and Visceral Psychological Study of Guilt and Grief
Selected as Slovakia's submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, the film is an incisive study of psychological rupture and its social reverberations.
Tallinn 2025 Review: NO COMMENT Finds Marital Comedy in a Political Crisis
Norwegian director Petter Næss turns to political satire to explore how a marital crisis intersects with the machinery of contemporary governance.
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",...
