Calgary Underground 2025: Curtain Raiser
Part fan-festival, with quietly subversive programming, and a gateway to oddness and offbeat cinema for Canada’s mid-west, the Calgary Underground Film Festival (CUFF) showcases a sampler of the highlights of indie, documentary and genre cinema from the festival circuit that...
FREAKY TALES Review: Four Freaky-ish Tales From The East Bay
A mysterious green fog leads to a wild week in the East Bay in Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s Freaky Tales. Narrated by legendary Oakland rapper, Too $hort, Freaky Tales is an interconnected anthology of bizarre, violent goings-on occurring over...
Cinequest 2025 Review: I'M NOT AN ACTOR, A Long Distance Drama Unfolds
A man and a woman audition for a film; he from Frankfurt, Germany, her from Mumbai, India. He is a banker, she is a serious actor, but the only way they get the job is by working together over a...
HOOD WITCH Review: Run For Your Life
Golshifteh Farahani stars in Saïd Belktibia's searing thriller.
SXSW 2025 Review: BROTHER VERSES BROTHER, A Live Cinema Musical With A Huge Heart
Twin brothers roam the streets of San Francisco in search of their AWOL father in Ari Gold’s blissfully introspective live cinema musical, Brother Verses Brother. The fact that Brother Verses Brother recently added Francis Ford Coppola to its credit block...
SXSW 2025 Review: ODYSSEY, A Super Tense Thriller With A Bloody Edge
Natasha Flynn (Polly Maberly) is a hustler. She runs an estate agency, selling and leasing properties all over London. Working from a flashy office with a cadre of hungry employees, on the verge of a profitable merger with a bigger...
SXSW 2025 Review: GLORIOUS SUMMER, Three Women Seek Freedom From Their Gilded Cage
Three women exist in an abandoned castle, bound by rules and rituals disseminated by disembodied voices, unburdened by want, but trapped in a dystopian wonderland they cannot leave in directors Helena Ganjalyan and Bartosz Szpak’s Glorious Summer. An ennui laden...
SXSW 2025 Review: NIRVANNA THE BAND THE SHOW THE MOVIE, Matt & Jay Go Back to the Future!
A pair of lovable losers come up with a series of ridiculous schemes to get their band a gig at Toronto’s legendary nightclub, The Rivoli in Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol’s Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie. A feature...
SXSW 2025 Review: THE SURRENDER, A Mother Attempts to Save Her Husband From Death Through Black Magic
Megan returns home after a long time away to support her mother, Barbara, as her father enters his dying days in writer/director Julia Max’s black magic horror film, The Surrender. Barbara’s (Kate Burton) husband has been ill for a very...
SXSW 2025 Review: FUCKTOYS, A Filth-filled Odyssey Though A Punk Rock Wonderland
A sometime sex worker longs for love in director/writer/star Annapurna Sriram’s chaotic debut feature film, Fucktoys. We meet AP (Sriram) mid-tarot reading, sitting in the middle of a swamp, listening to the wisdom of a psychic played by iconic rapper,...
SXSW 2025 Review: TOUCH ME, The Tentacled Erotic Horror Comedy You Didn't Know You Needed
Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) and Craig (Jordan Gavaris) are besties. Joey is a single gal trying to find something to inspire her ambition, and Craig is a relatively lazy – but charming – guy living off his family money. When...
SXSW 2025 Review: WE BURY THE DEAD, Daisy Ridley Leads This Genre Heavy Exploration of Grief
After a tragic accident leaves hundreds of thousands dead, a woman volunteers for clean up duty in an attempt to find her missing husband in Zak Hilditch’s meditative zombie thriller, We Bury the Dead. After an accidental nuclear detonation by...
SXSW 2025 Review: REDUX REDUX, A Woman Travels Across Dimensions Exacting Brutal Revenge
A woman travels across dimensions to take repeated revenge upon the man who killed her daughter in The McManus Brothers’ SXSW Film & TV Festival selection, Redux Redux. Irene Kelly (Michaela McManus) is a broken woman. Following the murder of...
SXSW 2025 Review: FRIENDSHIP, It's Hard Out Here For Dudes
Cringe comedy master Tim Robinson makes his feature lead debut alongside an always dependable Paul Rudd in Andrew DeYoung’s hilarious bromantic-comedy, Friendship. Craig Betterman (Robinson) is a man in a rut. He lives his life in an unending triangle between...
SXSW 2025 Review: DESCENDENT, A Father-to-Be's Alien Abduction Exposes Male Anxieties
One night while on patrol at his job as late-night security for an elementary school, soon-to-be father Sean (Ross Marquand) spots strange floating lights in the sky. As they flit around, he marvels, then when he goes to change a...
SXSW 2025 Review: HALLOW ROAD, A Folk Horror Two-Hander On A Deep, Dark Forest Lane
A tragic accident, a terrified teenage girl, a pair of panicked parents, and a long lonely road in the woods feature in Iranian-British director Babak Anvari’s latest chiller, Hallow Road, premiering as part of this year’s SXSW Film & TV...
SXSW 2025 Review: MERMAID, A Florida Meth-Head Finds Love in this Absurd Comedy
Doug’s life sucks. He’s broke, strung out on meth, his ex-wife hates him, he owes money to some very dangerous people, and he doesn’t really see a way out. He’s at the end of his rope when he stumbles across...
SXSW 2025 Review: ASH, Flying Lotus Delivers Gory Space Horror
Riya Ortiz wakes up in a desolate space station. Red warning lights flash, ominous automated messages call out from the station’s computer. Then the bodies. Bodies everywhere. These were friends, co-workers, maybe lovers. Now they are silent, covered in blood,...
SXSW 2025 Review: CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD, A Lackluster YA Slasher For Gen Z
After the death of his wife, doctor Glenn Maybrook (Aaron Abrams) moves out to the rural factory town of Kettle Springs his teenage daughter Quinn (Katie Douglas) in an attempt to give them both a fresh start. However, when an...
SXSW 2025 Review: GOOD BOY, A Furry Ghost Hunter Leads This Haunted House Chiller
We have this aluminum shed in our backyard. It’s leftover from the previous tenants. It is filled with potting soil, various broken garden tools, and at least a decade’s worth of random detritus that we’ve just been too lazy to...
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