Festivals Reviews
First Look 2026 Review: IT GOES THAT QUICK, A Home Movie That Goes Beyond
It's sort of a continuation of a home movie. But categorizing the film as either a documentary or a narrative would be doing the film a disservice.
Fantaspoa 2026 Review: REMANENTE: VOLTAGEM Delivers Scrappy, Lo-Fi Cosmic Horror
Two paramedics stumble upon treasure in an old basement. They accidentally open a dimensional portal, unleashing a cosmic horror-a creature determined to reclaim its gold at any cost.
PANDA Review: Beautiful Poetry for Marginalised People in Suburban China
Directed by Zhang Xinyang, the film combines the suffering of people with the charm they display while enduring it.
Guadalajara 2026 Review: THE AWAKENING (El Despertar), Echoes of History, Buried in Confusion
An elite military unit goes deep into the Colombian jungle to eliminate a strategic target. However, once they have completed the mission the unit finds themselves in a desperate fight for their lives as the violence awakens supernatural forces in...
Calgary Underground 2026 Review: CLAIRE'S HAT: THE UNMAKING OF A FILM
It seems strange to be writing a review for a film that is over 20 years old, about another film that few have seen. Given its rogue construction, and unorthodox structure and style, Claire’s Hat has been screened publicly...
Calgary Underground 2026 Review: BAGWORM, Visually Excoriates Modern Masculine Isolation
A man should have his house in order. Carroll’s house is most definitely not in order. He appears to be living in a burned out shell of a structure with the roof about to fall down on him. Seeing...
Calgary Underground 2026 Review: HANGASHORE, An Oblique Foggy Nightmare
When sailors or fishermen head out to sea, they do not wish to hear their family say goodbye out of a fear of not coming home. There is no whistling at sea, for fear of conjuring up a storm. Having...
Calgary Underground 2026 Review: LITTLE DOORS, A Tentative Dance Around Trust
“Things never got so bleak that I took up a hobby.” This sums up the world of Little Doors. The country is in a kind of ‘soft apocalypse’ where the big city may be on fire, and things are...
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...
Overlook 2026 Review: TRAUMA, OR MONSTERS ALL Brings A Thirty Year Project Full Circle
It's been a little over thirty years since indie horror godfather Larry Fessenden burst into the consciousness of the underground with his sideways vampire epic, Habit. In the decades since then, he and his Glass Eye Pix production house have...
Diagonale 2026 Review: WHITE SNAIL Subverts Girl-Meets-Boy Into Anti-Romance
Austrian-German filmmakers Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter's fiction debut reworks social drama conventions into a psychologically driven, docu-fiction hybrid centred on an unstable relationship shaped by loneliness, death and an implied autocratic backdrop.
Cinequest 2026 Review: HEARTWORM, Provocative, Poignant Sci-Fi Ghost Story
In the very near-future of husband-and-wife filmmaking duo Miriam Louise Arens and Mitchell Arens’ impressively realized feature-length debut, Heartworm, it could be the day after tomorrow. A family of three, Avena (Amber Gray), Mark (Juan Riedinger), and Zamira (Ellie...
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....
SXSW 2026 Review: EDIE ARNOLD IS A LOSER, A Wholesome Punk Rock Blast Of Teenage Rebellion
A frustrated catholic schoolgirl accidentally forms a punk band with her “turd” friends and turns her campus upside down in Edie Arnold is a Loser, the contagiously charming, super energetic debut feature from writer/directors Kade Atwood and Megan Rico. Edie...
SXSW 2026 Review: DRAG, Lizzy Caplan Shines As A Would-Be Thief Felled By A Bad Back
Sometimes it feels good to fuck over someone who has wronged you, but sometimes it turns out to be a terrible mistake. In the case of first-time feature writer/directors Raviv Ullman and Greg Yagolnitzer’s Drag, Lizzy Caplan and her movie...
Thessaloniki 2026 Review: CANDIDATES OF DEATH, Homemade Horror from Poland
A long-term experiment in filmmaking, Candidates of Death started almost 20 years ago when documentarian Maciej Cuske took his son Stasiu and his friends Rafal and Adrian on a vacation. Friends since kindergarten, the three youths were fans of horror...
SXSW 2026 Review: MIKE & NICK & NICK & ALICE, A Sci-Fi Action Gangster Hybrid With Heart
Mike (James Marsden) is done with the gangster life. He’s found a girl, he wants to settle down, and he’s ready to leave it all behind. There are a couple of problems, though. Number one, the girl, Alice (Eiza González),...
SXSW 2026 Review: THEY WILL KILL YOU, Zazie Beetz Slashes Her Way Through A Killer Cult In This Blast Of Bloody Energy
A woman seeking to rescue her little sister takes a job at an ultra-exclusive hotel only to find that the residents have a nasty, violent, murderous secret in director Kirill Sokolov’s Hollywood debut, They Will Kill You. Asia Reaves (Zazie...
SXSW 2026 Review: BEYOND THE DUPLEX PLANET Explores the Life of Artist David Greenberger
In documentaries like Welcome to the Club and The Winding Stream, director Beth Harrington celebrates the work of outsider artists, pinpointing their importance in culture. Beyond the Duplex Planet covers David Greenberger, more overlooked rather than an outsider. For years...
SXSW 2026 Review: MAM, Making a Dream Come True Is Hard Work
Director Nan Feix tells an irresistibly charming story of a cook and a waitress.
