Weird Reviews
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...
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.
TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME 4K Review
Directed by the recently departed, beloved David Lynch, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is the 1991 prequel to his popular television show of the same name. It’s out now in a 4K and Blu-ray combo package with deluxe booklet...
EYES WITHOUT A FACE Blu-ray Review: When Guilt and Love Make You Do Terrible Things
Sometimes a film is so enshrined in a canon, taken for granted as representative of either a genre (or subgenre), a national cinema, a director or actor's career, that it risks being a film talked about, but perhaps not watched,...
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.
MotelX 2025 Review: THE LAST SACRIFICE Has A Few Aces Up Its Sleeve
On Valentine's Day 1945, on a hill in the Cotswolds, England, the 74-year old farmer Charles Walton is found dead. You suspect that a documentary with this premise might be just a true crime doc, but The Last Sacrifice...
MotelX 2025 Review: THE RUN Is Another Stab At The Interactive Movie
The interactive movie has had a history since Bob Gale's Mr. Payback and games like Dragon's Lair and probably even way before that. But it never exceeded beyond a gimmick. That is until the game industry found ways to make...
MotelX 2025 Review: ALMA VIVA Is Another Winning Coming-Of-Age-Horror
Young Salomé has a great bond with her grandmother. She helps her grandmother out with seances, as her grandmother blends her Catholic religion with the older, more paganistic roots of the Portuguese countryside, and provides her services as someone who...
Fantastic Fest 2025 Review: THE RESTORATION AT GRAYSON MANOR
The Restoration at Grayson Manor is the brand-new film directed by the multi-talented Glenn McQuaid (I Sell the Dead). It just had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest, and ever since I saw the pitch at Frontieres forever ago, I’ve...
Toronto 2025 Review: COPPER, The Driest Slacker-Comedy Ever Made
The latest film from particular and peculiar Canadian-Mexican auteur Nicolás Pereda might flirt at times with a plot, but to view it this way is actually fool's gold. It is much more, specifically, a study of character in a...
Toronto 2025 Review: ADULTHOOD, Dark Comedy Tests the Sibling Bond
It's not easy watching one's parents get old, and having to care for them, mostly because we don't like to be reminded of how we're all end up with the problems of aging. The task of looking after aging parents...
Toronto 2025 Review: JUNK WORLD, A Dizzying Tale Told With Incredible Animation
Stalk-like creatures wriggling out of walls. Endless trenches that hide dangers. Half-men, half-robots in fetish wear. Removable eyes. These are just some of the wonders and weirdos that await in Takahide Hori's latest animated film, Junk World. Bizarre, funny, sometimes confusing,...
Toronto 2025 Review: THE LAST VIKING, Magnificently Absurd Excavation of Buried Baggage
There is a tiny scene in Anders Thomas Jensen’s latest irreverent and absurd character study, The Last Viking, that is utterly pure in regards to why I love his films and his storytelling sensibilities. A man tells a story...
Toronto 2025 Review: HEN, The Chicken Comes First
A parable of corruption in Greece as told through the ingenuity and survival instincts of a chicken, it says something when the most normal film in a director’s filmography is an endurance thriller told entirely from the point of view...
Toronto 2025 Review: ROSE OF NEVADA, Between a Rift in Time and the Deep Blue Sea
I am far from the first cinephile to point this out, but there is no substitute for print film when it comes to conveying texture. The crisp quality of digital may give clarity, but there is a depth to a...
Toronto 2025 Review: LEVERS, Perhaps the Unknown Will Save the World
A community gathers to celebrate the unveiling of a public sculpture. The artist is thanked, the significance recognized, the head of the local arts council praised for her efforts in making this moment happen. But it seems a moment of...
Toronto 2025 Review: EGGHEAD REPUBLIC, An Intern in a Gonzo Land
Considering the current political situation, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine a world where the Cold War never stopped, and where at one point it turned 'hot' enough for a nuclear bomb to fall, in this case...
THE TOXIC AVENGER Review: A Remake That Doesn't Forget the Laughs or the Guts
It's not small task to a) take on a remake of a popular cult classic, and b) take on a remake of a beloved cult classic that's classic not only in its own right, but firmly so because of it's...
EBONY AND IVORY Review: The Power of the Doobie-Woobie May Compel You
Jim Hosking's new comedy stars Sky Elobar, Gil Gex, and Carl Solomon.
Sound And Vision: Takashi Miike
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we look at Koji Kikkawa's Pandora, directed by Takashi Miike. Takashi Miike has directed over a hundred movies, but to my...
