Film Reviews

Billed as a psychological puzzle box with supernatural leanings, Lavender (2017) has plenty going for it. It’s a good-looking production, evocative in mood and often imaginative in its camera movements and editing tricks. Writer-director Ed Gass-Donnelly (The Last Exorcism Part ...

Functioning as something of a followup to Olivier Assayas’s tremendous Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), Personal Shopper (2016) is a brave and unsettling range of genres that melds everything from the Gothic ghost story to drama of personal crisis to ...

There’s something darkly disturbing lurking in those moody Pacific North West woodlands once again, as a desperate father searches for his four year old son. Little Adam has gone missing during the night on a family hunting trip (what sort ...

Whether it’s through nuclear holocausts, global war, disease, meteor strikes, natural disasters or other forms of devastation capable of wiping out civilisation as we know it, post-apocalyptic worlds have served as backdrops in literature and cinema for quite some time. ...

Virus: Extreme Contamination (2016) is the 17th directorial effort of prolific Italian director Domiziano Cristopharo and the first to see him team up with contemporary Italian genre stalwart and writer Antonio Tentori, who is best known for his work on Lucio ...

The mere conception of a horror anthology film with all of its short-form segments written, produced, and directed by women (and three of them from the point-of-view of a mother) is an exceedingly exciting achievement. Better late than never, huh? ...

Originally intended to ride the coattails of William Crane’s delightful Blacula (1972), Bill Gunn’s 1973 film Ganja & Hess is a far more complicated and experimental creation. While Blacula is arguably a reinterpretation of Count Yorga, Vampire (1970) — itself ...

As horror indie Don’t Knock Twice (2017) seems to prove, sometimes it just takes an unstoppably evil hag to help strengthen the bond between an estranged (and equally troubled) mother and daughter. Director Caradog James (The Machine, 2014) and screenwriters ...

One of the most compelling plot devices of film noir involves an opening sequence that establishes that the film’s protagonist is dead, or soon will be, as seen in classic titles like Sunset Boulevard or D.O.A. (both produced in 1950). ...

One of my favorite film subgenres is the recent trend of psychological mystery thrillers that bear elements of the eerie and macabre, but don’t delve deeply into outright horror. Director and co-writer Joseph Sims-Dennett’s ultra-low-budget Australian film Observance (2015) is ...