What comes through most resonantly in Apples is its envisioning of a society starting over, and its suggestion that a clean slate, accepted honestly, might not be the worst thing.
Isaac Feldberg
Film Review: At the Fantasia International Film Festival, Part Three
In wrapping up Fantasia, I focused on The Five Rules of Success, Come True, and The Dark and the Wicked, three ambitious genre titles that have stuck with me long since their credits rolled.
Film Review: At the Fantasia International Film Festival, Part Two
Movies, great or awful, are essential comforts in these nightmarish times. And in my second dispatch of the Fantasia fest, I bring better tidings.
Film Review: “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” — Charlie Kaufman’s Hall of Existential Mirrors Glimmers Darkly
I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a bit of a wonder, a careful nightmare that demands rapt attention even if repeated viewings do little to assuage its eeriness.
Film Review: At the Fantasia International Film Festival, Part One
The Mortuary Collection is a dark diamond in the rough of this year’s Fantasia so far, a canny ode to horror history that pays respect to its elders without appearing dated or derivative.
Film Review: Shudder’s “La Llorona” — A Supernatural Reckoning with Guatemalan Genocide
La Llorona’s deepest horrors flow from real history, from the atrocities inflicted by powerful men and the institutions established to ensure they get away with it.
Film Review: “The Rental” — Low Rent B and B Horror
The Rental chugs along predictable genre rails, its characters settling into the expected “types” as screws are gradually turned on them by whoever’s surveilling from a distance.
Film Review: “The Beach House” — Eco-Horrors on Cape Cod
Sharp, simple, and well-attuned to the hopelessly grim tenor of these past few years, The Beach House knows how doomed we all are, says we deserve it, and prays that, after the tide comes in to wash us out, the rest will be left to flourish.
Film Review: At the Boston Underground Film Festival — “Knife+Heart” and “Mope”
My mind is busy considering the presence of two distinctly engrossing thrillers of sex and violence set within the adult film industry, one a vividly romantic neo-giallo fairy tale, the other a discomfiting, tragicomic spiral into murder and depravity.
Film Review: “Greta” — Psycho Thriller, Qui Est-Ce?
A B-movie par excellence, Greta’s the kind of unhinged and yet fiendishly well-calibrated genre fare that rarely gets afforded the attentions of a director as accomplished as Neil Jordan.