“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 […]
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 […]
Corpus (2026) is a brooding and subtle horror film which reveals its key ideas very slowly and carefully; arguably, it never allows us to understand everything, preferring to focus on its sensual, uneasy world-building and those who finds themselves there. We start in 1997: there’s an as-yet unseen photographer doing a shoot with a young […]
Zombies and Christmas: why haven’t we had more of this combination before? The overlaps kind of write themselves: gluttony, conspicuous consumption, a strong tradition of being trapped in the house. Unholy Night (2026) begins well, and clearly has a sense of how these two things could work well, but after a bold opening sequence which […]
“The whole point was you’re not supposed to space out.” We find ourselves following two pleasant but aimless young men during the opening scenes of Sour Minnows (2026), as Ricky (David Brown) and Tepper (Chase Williamson) talk contentedly about this and that, though often circling obliquely back to their favourite topics: filmmaking and film. They’re […]
We first see ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ (twins Emma and Ian Ho) as babies; these two children, now in their early teens or thereabouts, seem to have spent their entire lives in a spacious, but rather dark and dated-looking home, with only each other for company. However, this isn’t Megalomaniac (2022); the kids seem contented, they […]
Austria, the early 19th Century: in an evocative opening scene, a young woman kisses her hand to the gravestone of ‘Seraphine’, her late sister. The young woman, Florentine (Alina Schaller) is about to be married to Bruno (Daniel Holzberg), a minister who has just come into his living. Their lives should be happy, but Florentine […]
1862: the Faroe Islands, and a small, devout but insular community eking out a living in this remote place. We meet Ásla (Sofia Nolsøe) and her adult son, Baldur (Egor Venned, channelling a very young Rupert Everett). Baldur is a fisherman, who one day finds himself blanketed by an unanticipated sea-fret which disorientates him and […]