Bound (2023)

After throwing abusive stepfather figure and local drug dealer Gordy (Bryant Carroll) out of the family home, art student Bella (Alexandra Faye Sadeghian) forlornly hopes that he will stay out of the lives of both her and fragile mother Yeva (Pooya Mohseni). However, he’s back almost instantly, Yeva caving in to Gordy’s pleading and assuring […]

The Thicket (2024)

Orphaned as a result of a smallpox epidemic, siblings Jack (Levon Hawke) and Lula Parker (Esme Creed-Miles) leave their homestead and, with their grandfather, begin a journey across forbidding territory to their aunt’s place. A run-in with notorious outlaw Cutthroat Bill (Juliette Lewis) ends with grandfather dead, Lula kidnapped and Jack needing to rescue his […]

Birdeater (2023)

Don’t take medication which isn’t intended for you. Think twice about taking medication which is intended for you. These are the takeaway lessons of Birdeater (2023) – a film which relies heavily on altered states for both its linear and experimental plot points. This is as much of a moral standpoint as anything you get […]

Vulcanizadora (2024)

There’s a scene in Vulcanizadora where, in the darkness of the woods, one of the main characters unpacks a Discman and some analogue speakers he’s brought along to entertain his friend on their camping trip. Nothing works; the cable isn’t connected to the speakers at first, but they hiss anyway; the Discman skips and stutters, […]

A Desert (2024)

There’s a moment during the first act of A Desert when one character asks another character, an outsider, ‘You like being a tourist?’ It’s this divided America which forms the unstable foundations of the film, looking at what happens to people choosing to be tourists in their own country, spectators in a version of America […]

The Vatican Versus Horror Movies by Matt Rogerson

Horror cinema writing is a broad and broadening church, despite (or perhaps because) of the increasingly ephemeral, online nature of much modern film criticism. Print media continues to be written, printed, read, collected and enjoyed, from the self-published to the most lavish tomes. It’s in a good place right now, and in The Vatican Versus […]