She Listens Alone opens with online counsellor Sabrina (Alivia Levie) appearing in the bottom right-hand corner of a laptop screen, mutely listening as a gamut of strangers talk her through their life issues – kids, divorce, loneliness, anxiety. Then we zoom in on one session in particular, which stands out because it’s a woman fantasising […]
Heresy (2024) begins – in a non-specified, but very much rural, pre-industrial setting – with a young woman, Frieda (Anneke Sluiters) dismayed by the arrival of her period. Although her husband seems, at least initially, kind, it’s clear that her continued lack of a pregnancy is a big problem in this harsh, impoverished community, one […]
A lone hiker (Tara Perry) is distracted by her phone and gets ambushed by a knife-wielding stranger in the woods – that’s it, that’s the chosen opening to Where Darkness Falls (2025), but it seems Trish, the hiker, survives her ordeal, racking up a slew of therapy appointments and meditation recordings in the year which […]
Veteran cop Teddy Sharpe (Lou Diamond Phillips) attempts to keep law and order as the senior officer representing the Tribal Force of the Thunderstone reservation. His methods are not always convention and he’s often at odds with local Sheriff Darius Humphrey (Nick Stahl) because Teddy understands the social and economic issues which plague the generally […]
With the incredible levels of social media saturation now possible – often moving from cute pet videos to real-life ordeals in an easy move – then you could be forgiven for thinking that there’s no overarching controls out there, but apparently, there are. Margot (Barbie Ferreira) works for the Kino video app, attaching content warnings […]
By Adam Page I want to put my position on the table before a frame of this comes up on the screen, as I think you should know where I stand before I tell you this documentary is really quite good. In my considered and totally unrepentant view, Exorcist II: The Heretic is a bad […]
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 […]
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 […]