Every year – and I have done lists like this for quite a few years now – I wonder what I’ll say for the little preamble: before getting straight to talking about the films themselves, it always feels proper to say a little something first. Well, this year I’ll start by saying this: 2023 has […]
Eli Roth is one of the best-known horror directors out there, which is perhaps surprising, given his relatively small body of work: some of that body of work has been pretty divisive, too. But his love of genre film has never been in question, he’s a horror guy, and his feature-length take on Thanksgiving is […]
A searing indictment of exploiting the proletariat for political and financial gain, this short film is essential viewing for anyone interested in the history of…nah, come on, look at what it’s called. It’s about a girl with a haunted vagina, the very idea of which will cause amusing pearl clutching by those who think we […]
My initial review for The Coffee Table was going to be one word and one word only. Fuck. As gimmicky, nay, lazy and clickbait-inducing piece of film commentary as that would have been, it summed up the overriding thought in my head as the end credits rolled. It was also an approximation of the sound […]
On seeing the title of this, you’d be forgiven for having the initial thought of “Not another film about the making of The Exorcist, but Robin Bextor’s documentary is certainly not just another film about the making of The Exorcist, choosing to focus much of its runtime on the lead up to the production and […]
Horror and art: it’s a faithful, longstanding relationship which continues to turn out a few films – good and bad – every single year. And then we come to The Portrait, a film which you could be forgiven for assuming was a fairly straightforward horror story – but it isn’t. Paring back the horror to […]
It’s the most terrible time of the year: it’s the present day, and – Santa has mysteriously stopped delivering presents, ending winter. Writers and directors Manuel Camilion and Benjamin Edelman have created a retro-feeling homage to both Mary Shelley and Father Christmas here that sometimes finds its feet, but other times feels frail. With few […]
Cinema teaches us that female travellers in remote climes are not in for an easy time of it. Perhaps it’s sending a message: get straight to work. Don’t risk a gap year or a prolonged vacation; it’s just not worth it. The Royal Hotel (2023) certainly starts out along those lines, though it shifts things […]
Well, Adam Chaplin certainly doesn’t mess about. If the opening few minutes are to be taken as a calling card, then this is nothing if not an honest film: the first ‘characters’ we see are in the process of being decapitated, their faces are getting pummelled, blood is flowing – all, as of yet, inexplicably. […]
This intense debut fresh out of South Korea from writer and director Kim Jae-hoon brings us a thrilling, colorful, and bloody tale of body swapping mayhem in Devils. We open to a group of smiling fiends painting a dead woman while dismembering her and videotaping it. Two police officers approach the scene, one slightly ahead […]
A mainstay of science-fiction, by this point in time, is often in how it manages the human consequences of scientific change. Risks, dilemmas, emotional impacts: what awaits mankind when it truly breaks free of the bounds which constrain it? Well, we go a step further in Tropic (2022), to the extent that it’s not exactly […]