Like many film festivals, Final Girls Berlin understands the value of short films and includes themed blocks of these on the schedule. This particular block – loosely grouped under the ever-popular title of ‘folk horror’ – is an eclectic range of films from a diverse roster of countries, though there are still, appreciably, thematic similarities. […]
Director Howard J. Ford has had a go at the lot over the past couple of decades, variously delivering independent films on zombies, cannibals, climbing – and now, extra-terrestrials. Moving around subgenres in this way, no wonder there’s been some variability: Bone Keeper (2026) is certainly evidence of that. It’s by no means the first […]
Starting with a couple of fake 80s DTV trailers (The Piano Killer and Don’t Go In That House, Bitch!) Jimmy & Stiggs – presented by Eli Roth – feels a little like an in-joke in places, and the Roth fan service and nods are clear to see, particularly in the early part of this feature. […]
Rarely does a film exercise the public this much before it’s even been released, but Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” – speech marks and all – has done it. This has been rumbling along for months actually, and certainly for longer than usual, even for most contentious film adaptations. Long before the trailer landed, it was […]
There’s an embalming taking place as we open on The Mortuary Assistant (2026) – embalmment being normal practice, rather than an occasional thing, in the US. Here, intern Rebecca (Willa Holland) is being assessed on her skills in the field, so she can finally be signed off as competent – though I tell you what, […]
Here’s what we discover from the earliest scenes of Roof (2026): Dev (Asif Ali) doesn’t come across as a very nice person. As he practices affirmations into the mirror while getting ready for his working day, he’s concurrently ignoring voicemails from both his girlfriend and his mother. He doesn’t have time for their special pleadings; […]
We’re busy, busy, busy as we get underway with Indonesian horror movie The Hole (2026), aka The Hole, 309 Days to the Bloodiest Tragedy (which rolls less well off the tongue). Leading with a notice which we normally see on the end credits of a film – ‘Any similarity to actual characters, places or events […]
Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) has it made: we know he has it made the moment we first see him, barbequing eel outside his spacious home whilst wearing a contented smile and a ‘happy at my level of maturity’ moustache. Not only that, but the eel was sent as a gift by his impressed new bosses at […]
So this is Glacier National Park, Montana in the 1960s and we start with a question: why are two people open-air camping in grizzly territory? Roll opening credits – genuine retro footage of people behaving stupidly around wild brown bears and the discomfiting reminder that the incidents in the film, open-air camping and all, are […]
By contributing writer Chris Ward Valeria (Natalia Solián) is a young woman trying to start a family with her husband Raúl (Alfonso Dosal). After visiting Monumental de la Virgen De Guadalupe – a large statue in Chalma, Mexico, sculpted in 2017 by artist Víctor Gutiérrez – with her mother and her aunt, Valeria discovers that […]
Whilst the genre of ‘found footage’ is more on a downward arc these days than it was, say, fifteen or twenty years ago – when every no-budget filmmaker was irresistibly drawn to its cheap, practical possibilities – it’s nonetheless so familiar by now that we can instantly recognise its trappings and conventions. As such, we […]