Rounding off our Fantasia 2022 coverage, we have a glance at another run of short films – this time, directed exclusively by women. And it’s a varied, often very dark collection of films, touching upon subjects such as superstition, statelessness, secret worlds, the afterlife, friendship, love and trauma. Lily’s Mirror operates in a ghastly early […]
Remember that meme from a few years ago which pointed out that if you run Godzilla backwards, it’s the story of a benevolent lizard who builds a city before moonwalking into the sea? Yeah, yeah, but it raises a valid point: you have to wonder, in those many fine films where a city gets decimated […]
Let’s cut to the chase here: we’re big supporters of short film as a medium here at the site, but whether you’re a regular reader or not, surely you’d agree that the presence of short films is of tremendous benefit to any film festival. The storytelling is pared back by necessity in a short film […]
All great old cities are built on the bones of the dead. Paris conceals miles of spooky catacombs beneath its streets. London sits on layers of plague pits, paupers’ graves, Roman-era burials, the forgotten dead from wartime conflagrations, as well as the ashes of its own ancient sacking. Tokyo, the main urban centre of Japan […]
The Breach (2022) knows exactly what it wants to be: that is, a solid horror yarn, a midnight movie by design which might not surprise you with its plot elements, but will keep you consistently entertained as it burns through a significant number of genre features. Directed by Rodrigo Gudiño, founder of Rue Morgue magazine, […]
Honeycomb (2022) is an odd prospect. Electively surreal with a minimal storyline, it often feels a little clumsy where it intends to be out-there. But it’s not without charm, even if much of that derives from its long, mood-drenched shots of long summer days. If you can imagine Yellowjackets remade as a Beck video (complete […]
There’s been a tendency in pop culture to present serial killers as monolithic: they’ve often been painted as almost supernatural, not only ungoverned by the usual social and cultural norms but devoid of familial ties, too. But that is changing: more recent films and TV have hinted at least at something more going on with […]
The spectre of the tower block looms appropriately large over modern society. On one hand these blocks are still ‘modern’ and ‘aspirational’, but on the other, they’re seen as unfriendly spaces, whether because degraded, dangerous or just suspiciously separate from other modes of living. Cinema has examined the worst extremes – Land of the Dead […]
It’s clear by now that the pandemic has had a profound impact upon filmmaking – whether from a logistical point of view, or in terms of subject matter. Skeleton crews, deserted streets, plotlines about contagion…horror, more than other genres, has seen them all in the past couple of years. This is to be expected: as […]
Before The Blood of the Dinosaurs gets properly started, we see a few seconds of footage where director and writer Joe Badon is chatting to one of the film’s stars, Kali Russell. So, what’s your movie about?’ she laughingly asks, before Badon turns the question back on her: ‘What do you think it’s about?’ In […]
With such a long pedigree of films which have explored altered states in impressively oddball ways, it presumably gets tougher and tougher for filmmakers to distinguish their own impressively oddball films from the rest. Well, a title like ‘All Jacked Up and Full of Worms‘ is certainly a good start. The film itself goes further […]
