Make Believe Film Fest 2024: A Most Atrocious Thing

How do you signal to your audience that things are going to head south pretty fast – other than by titling your film A Most Atrocious Thing, that is? Turns out it’s by showing us almost instantly a sign reading Danger! Contaminated Water! Then a deer drinking from this water, before cutting straight to some […]

They Remain (2018)

Any film that opens on a title card bearing a quote from HP Lovecraft is guaranteed to get horror fans sitting up and taking notice. Whether the subsequent hour and a half of They Remain will keep them in that upright, attentive position is another matter. Writer-director Philip Gelatt’s film strives to give us an […]

Rabbit (2017)

It’s comparatively rare these days to go into a film viewing with no idea of what to expect, so often your best chance at this is to gain access to an online screener – particularly if these screeners come via film festivals which, for good or ill, have a fairly selective audience until such time […]

Capture Kill Release (2016)

Has any two-word alliterative descriptor inspired so much abject despair in the past two decades as ‘found footage?’ (Don’t answer that, I’m sure there are plenty worse if I put my mind to it.) While the handheld, shakey-cam, first-person perspective mock-real approach has produced a good few gems – say, the REC movies, Cloverfield, Troll […]