Festivals Reviews
Vlissingen 2024 Review: ONCE AGAIN (FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME) Brims With Renewal
Boaz Yakin's Once Again (For the Very First Time) signals something of a rebirth. In it's opening moments, the protagonist falls from the heavens with bloodied clothing and lands on the doorstep of his love interest. He is a street...
Vlissingen 2024 Review: THE MAGNET MAN Mesmerizes
One of my favorite films of all time is Gust Van den Berghe's Lucifer, a film that is so stylistically audacious it is hard to compare it to anything else. Based on a famous Flemish version of the Lucifer-story and...
Camera Japan Rotterdam 2024 Review: THE COLORS WITHIN Shines With Bright Hues
Back in 2016-2017, director Yamada Naoko shook up the anime industry with her high-school bully drama A Silent Voice. The film took an uncommonly candid view of life in school, with people often doing stupid things while still totally unaware...
Lausanne 2024 Review: BEEZEL, Hex Marks the Spot in Haunted House Found Footage Horror
American indie filmmaker Aaron Fradkin fuses old-school horror aesthetics with modern found footage techniques to deliver a multi-generational tale of supernatural terror, unfolding within a cursed New England home.
Lausanne 2024 Review: SELF DRIVER Spins Survival Satire in Gig Economy Gone Rogue
In Michael Pierro's darkly satirical debut, a cash-strapped cab driver plunges into a digital enslavement where the promise of easy money reveals a world of moral decay, autonomy lost, and the high stakes of a gig economy spiraling out of control.
Brooklyn Horror 2024 Review: PSYCHONAUT, Love Heals All Wounds
A late night altercation on a dark and stormy night leaves Maxime’s girlfriend Dylan with a life threatening head wound. Given the circumstances surrounding how Dylan got injured Max can’t take her to the hospital so she takes her to...
Austin 2024 Review: IN VITRO, Among the Cloned Cattle in Oz
Talia Zucker and Ashley Zukerman star in a demented and nutty thriller, directed by Will Howarth and Tom McKeith.
Brooklyn Horror 2024 Review: BONE LAKE, Sleek, Sexy Erotic Thrilller Comes With a Big Finish
Professional couple Sage and Diego check in to their weekend rental, a literal mansion by a lake. Before they can say that it is almost too good to be true a younger, hotter couple, Matt and Cin, walk through the...
Camera Japan Rotterdam 2024 Review: LET'S GO KARAOKE! Unites Audiences!
This year, director Yamashita Nobuhiro (Linda, Linda, Linda, Tamako in Moratorium) was the guest of honor at the Camera Japan Film Festival in Rotterdam. The programme showed no less than five films by him, all of which were released in...
Busan 2024 Review: THE KILLERS, Lee Myung-se Masterminds Gleefully Cinematic Hemingway and Noir-Inspired Anthology
Some 17 years ago, viewers were both maddened and mesmerized by the tactile fever dream that was M, a cornucopia of sound and motion that is, for the moment, Lee Myung-se's last feature-length testament to the cinema medium he so...
New York 2024 Review: WHO BY FIRE (COMME LE FEU), Bad Times at the Cabin in the Woods
Does anything good ever come out of vacationing in the woods? In genre cinema, going away for a weekend to a remote location is a recipe for all kinds of unpleasantness to happen. In festival dramas – eh, it usually...
London 2024 Review: CONCLAVE, Papal Election Drama Is Consummate Adult Entertainment
Edward Berger's Oscar-bound follow-up to 'All Quiet On The Western Front' stars Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow and Isabella Rosellini.
Montreal Nouveau 2024 Review: SCHIRKOA: IN LIES WE TRUST, Anonymous Dystopia to Queer Utopia
Authoritarian dystopian futures, as imagined by writers, artists, and filmmakers, often have familiar tropes, usually about the neutralization of individuality, the importance of conformity, and how it eventually becomes impossible to keep the brightness and individuality of the human spirit...
New York 2024 Review: SUBURBAN FURY, The Truth is Still Out There in This Captivating Documentary Thriller
Even with all the collective force of human imagination, evidenced by books, scripts and conspiracy theories, nothing can be as wonderfully and sometimes scarily incredible as reality. Some history lessons, even seemingly lesser ones, are so genuinely wild it’s hard...
New York 2024 Review: TRANSAMAZONIA, Uneven But Poignant Coming-of-Age Story
A plane crashes in the Amazon jungle leaving a sole survivor, a five-year-old child named Rebecca, who is then saved just in time by an Indigenous Iruaté man. Nine years pass, and Rebecca (Helena Zengel) is now widely known as...
Montreal Nouveau 2024 Review: ON BECOMING A GUINEA FOWL
It's hard to imagine what any of us would do, if we were driving along a quite road and came across a dead body, let alone the body of a member of our family. For Shula (Susan Chardy), on her...
Hawaii 2024 Review: Hard Justice in BALOTA
It seems like election conflicts are the norm right now, or perhaps it’s always been this way, and we just notice it more in the age of constant social media and news. Kip Oebanda’s (Abandoned, Liway) latest film, Balota, addresses...
Montreal Nouveau 2024 Review: THE HUMAN HIBERNATION, Under a Cow's Eye
Like many Canadians (and others who live in a colder climate), I often dream - at least fleetingly - about hibernating for the winter, like our bear brethren. Sleeping away those colder months, and reawakening with the earth as it...
Hawaii 2024 Review: Kurosawa's CLOUD Baffles
I saw Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s (Pulse, Cure) latest film, Cloud, at the 44th annual Hawaii International Film Festival, and man, am I perplexed. I love Pulse (Kairo) and I wanted to love Cloud, but I can’t even figure out what the...
Hawaii 2024 Review: SISTER MIDNIGHT Has a Punk Rock Flavor
Sister Midnight from Karan Kandhari (Bye Bye Miss Goodnight) is a hard film to review and classify, but I’m going to try after seeing the film at the 44th annual Hawaii International Film Festival. Funded in part by the British...
