On the outskirts of a drab Australian town, we meet new boy Naim (Joe Bird). After what can be gleaned to be a period of isolation, he seems pleased to be hanging out with someone from his school, Ryan (Stacy Clausen) – Ryan seems older and tougher, although he’s a classmate, and he’s definitely got […]
It feels like a while since we had a really good, honest-to-goodness zombie flick. For a while there, there were enough of them that we could debate whether zombies should be able run or not; with a few exceptions, though, the genre has stalled since the ferocious Train to Busan a decade ago (despite the […]
“This is a true story…sort of.” Wasting no time in getting its players on the board and establishing its own sardonic spin on Americana, Valley View Motel (2026) is a love letter to the 70s crime genre cinema with which it shares its setting. We start with what looks like a robbery gone very wrong […]
“You picked Haddaway?” 2012: Jerry’s, somewhere in the boonies, is the self-proclaimed ‘best bar in town’, with a thriving karaoke night taking place – right up until a drunk stumbles over and yanks out the machine’s power cable, blasting the literal eyeballs out of the current performer. I like it when a film makes a […]
Should you meet your heroes? Oh god, no – that’s the takeaway from Starsuckers (2026), a new entrant in the understandably-growing new subgenre of social media horror, even if it only ever really dabbles with horror elements. It’s about how vulnerable people now venerate dreadful Influencers, and possibly about the moment of realisation that the […]
There’s a popular line of films and television which consists of finding an idyllic (or idyllic-seeming) retro America, and then menacing it with something bloody horrible – as if to say it was never that good, not really, but also because once you’ve created a weird feeling of audience deja-vu over the clothes, toys and […]
A nightmarish (and as-yet mysterious) opening scene segues into what appears to be something like normal life, as we get started with Night After Night (2026): this is a false impression which persists as a motif throughout this alienating, unsettling film. We meet security guard Andy (Scott Poythress) and his buddy Willis (Johnny Sibilly). They […]
São Paulo party planner Malu (Martha Nowill) has a lot to do, toilet breaks notwithstanding. She has a cake to worry about, there are last-minute arrangements to make, and her twins’ father hasn’t come to pick them up as arranged, which is unhelpful, so she optimises a spare moment by helping to yank out her […]
We start with a shock in the opening moments of A Safe Distance (2026), as a tranquil forest setting erupts with a gunshot – and the film then obliquely reveals a body. Two women silently depart the scene, clean themselves up and then hitch their way out of there, finding their way to the nearest […]
Myanmar is better-known to Westerners for its political situation than for its cinema scene – much less its genre cinema scene – but low budget horror has developed a decent foothold in the country, with The Last Footage (2026) director Arkar Soe Oo already a well-known name domestically. The Last Footage is the country’s first […]
Nightborn (2026) is a film hectic with female and feminine anxieties. In common with director Hanna Bergholm’s last feature film, Hatching (2022), it explores childrearing and infant care through a supernatural lens, and whilst the supernaturalism itself flows parallel to the very real human issues in the story, the supernatural elements themselves are beautifully handled […]