Indie Reviews
BALLISTIC Review: Mother Undone by Her Son's Battlefield Death
Lena Headey stars in director Chad Faust's unexpectedly nuanced and consistently engrossing drama.
CITY WIDE FEVER Review: Not Really a Giallo Homage, And That's Ok
Josh Heaps’ City Wide Fever is a real oddity. On the surface, it’s a small DIY thriller that looks shot on the cheap, which already narrows down its appeal. But if you get on its wavelength over the course of its very brief...
ERUPCJA Review: Of Turning Points and Volcanoes
Charli XCX, Lena Góra, Will Madden, and Jeremy O. Harris star in Pete Ohs' effervescent, gracefully-wrought film.
REVELATIONS OF DIVINE LOVE Review: Earnest, If Stagey, Tale of Unwavering Faith
Acts. Questions. Steps. Leaps. All words with which 'of faith' can be easily and appropriately clipped on, and applied especially to Caroline Golum's Revelations of Divine Love, a micro-budget marvel of faith-based cinema that dramatises (and implicitly modernises) the writings...
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...
INFILTRATE Review: Generic Actioner Elevated by Superior Stunt Work
James Mark directed the action thriller, starring Orphée Ladouceur-Nguyen, Tim Rozon, Mitra Suri, Alain Moussi, and Lisa Berry.
THE CHRISTOPHERS Review: Art Forgery Comedy-Drama Excels On Every Level
Steven Soderbergh's film stars Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel, with James Corden, Jessica Gunning.
BUNNYLOVR Review: Opaque Character Study of a Cam-Girl
Katarina Zhu stars in and directs a striking drama, co-starring Austin Amelio, Perry Yung, and Rachel Sennott.
THE TRAVEL COMPANION Review: Friendship and Filmmaking Commingle in Deadpan, Bittersweet Comedy
Directed by Travis Wood & Alex Mallis, the film stars Tristan Turner, Anthony Oberbeck, and Naomi Asa.
Diagonale 2026 Review: MOTHER'S BABY Masks a Paranoid Thriller Within an Ambiguous Psychological Portrait
Marie Leuenberger and Claes Bang star. Austrian filmmaker Johanna Moder tackles post-partum depression and potential psychosis as a slow-burning paranoid thriller, where maternal anxiety is filtered through an unreliable perspective and edged with traces of dark humour.
THE YETI Review: Chilling Premise Undone by Lukewarm Craft
Brittany Allen and Jim Cummings star in this lackluster old-school creature feature.
MERMAID Review: Curious Mix of Crime Thriller and Theatre of the Absurd
Tyler Cornack's action-comedy-horror stars Johnny Pemberton, Avery Potemri, Kevin Nealon, Kirk Fox, Julia Larson, Devyn McDowell, Tom Arnold with Robert Patrick and Kevin Dunn.
Diagonale 2026 Review: PORTRAIT OF NOWNESS Assembles a Fragmented Mosaic
Co-created by Juri Rechinsky and Mario Hainzl, the film constructs a first-person docu-experiment in which body-camera footage across multiple continents reframes notions of everyday life through contrasting conditions of normalcy.
Diagonale 2026 Review: THE STORIES Turns Familiar Tragicomic Family Saga Tropes into Finetuned Crowd-pleaser
Abu Bakr Shawky's film unfolds as a multi-generational family saga that situates an intimate love story within the shifting social and political landscape of Egypt from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Diagonale 2026 Review: WAX & GOLD Probes Memory and Myth of Ethiopia's Beloved Autocrat
Austrian filmmaker Ruth Beckermann uses the spatial and historical layers of the Hilton Addis Ababa to examine how the legacy of Haile Selassie is constructed, negotiated and contested through personal memory, archival material and competing narratives.
Diagonale 2026 Review: ROSE, Sandra Hüller Excels in Period Drama Examining Pursuit of Freedom Through Cross-dressing
Austrian filmmaker Markus Schleinzer's third feature casts Sandra Hüller as a woman who adopts a male identity within a Protestant farming community during the Thirty Years' War in order to secure property, labour autonomy and social legitimacy otherwise inaccessible to her.
THE DRAMA Review: Viscerally Affecting Comedy?
Kristoffer Borgli's The Drama sits somewhere between much of Lars von Trier's output and Sean Price Williams's The Sweet East on the artful edgelord spectrum; albeit closer to the latter's live action South Park than the sometimes incisive work of...
Home Video Roundup: DEATHSTALKER and More New Releases From Kino, The Criterion Collection, Warner and Made By Mutant
Dave Canfield aka The Creature Feature Preacher here to opine on all things physical media. I’ve got titles from The Criterion Collection, Warner Brothers and Kino and a very special vinyl release from Made By Mutant. It’s a rich mix...
ALPHA Review: Violent Grief and Desperate Love
Grief is not a straight line that slowly leads from deep sorrow to acceptance and remembrance; it comes in waves, and can reignite like a bonfire at the strangest moments, even decades on. Fear can likewise come like an tornado...
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...
