Reviews and coverage from major film festivals including Sundance, SXSW, SIFF, TIFF, and Cannes— the best and the rest of festival cinema.
In My Animal, Jacqueline Castel deftly blends ’80s nostalgia and Giallo inspiration into a queer, modern fairy tale. This indie film take on high school werewolf erotica feels like a darker, more niche Stephanie Meyer creation, complete with issues of abuse and alcoholism, the tension of forbidden love, and, yes, werewolf angst. Bobbi Salvör Menuez...
Some of the most romantic movies to ever exist (Before Sunset) don’t feature even a kiss. Enter Past Lives, Celine Song’s achingly romantic two-hander about a pair of entangled Korean childhood friends who must navigate their deep connection across 7,000 miles (she’s in New York, he’s in Korea) and 24 years as they drift into...
A contemplative and unique Korean thriller, Jung Ju-ri’s Next Sohee is artfully directed and performed with reserved grace. Sohee (Kim Si-Eun) is an “extern”, a student worker exploited for their labor, mandated to work a call center as a precondition for graduation. Ju-ri turns the office worker grind into a mental prison that chisels away...
The occult dabblings of the Nazi party casts a dark pall over the estate of a witchy Baroness circa 1975 Austria in Marie Alice Wolfszahn’s Mother Superior. The atmospheric, feminist midnight movie tells the story of deep-cover nurse Sigrun (Isabella Händler) as she attempts to puzzle out the mysteries of her lineage, only to stumble...
Georgie (Lola Campbell) is a 12-going-on-30 type, living on her lonesome in her London flat following the death of her mum in Scrappers. When her estranged deadbeat dad (Harris Dickinson) hops the fence and re-enters her life one day, Georgie has to navigate her newfound feelings towards her out-of-the-woodwork parental figure in writer-director Charlotte Regan’s...
Dying babies. Dead bodies. Mass graves. Shelled maternity wards. War crimes. 20 Days in Mariupol is not for the faint of heart. It is however an urgent and unblinking reminder of the atrocities occurring to this day in Ukraine, with director Mstyslav Chernov documenting indiscriminate violence in horrifying detail. This makes for a documentary that’s...
A feel-bad Belgium coming-of-age story, Veerle Baetens’ When It Melts focuses on increasingly predatory pubescent children as they learn the art of exploitation. Icky but powerful – and powerfully performed (young Rosa Marchant is outstanding) – this somber drama is incredibly uncomfortable but packs an emotional wallop. Though it becomes increasingly obvious where things are...
Everyone’s always a suspect in any slasher movie worth its salt and that’s true up until the very last moments in Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies. The film, which stars a slew of established and rising talent in the form of Maria Bakalova, Lee Pace, Amandla Stenberg, Chase Sui Wonders, Peter Davidson, and a scene-stealing...
When out-of-tower Hamish (Cosmo Jarvis) gets in a head-on-collision with Irish teenagers Callum and Evan (Rhys Mannion), only the later survives. Reeling from the fallout, the unscathed Evan and banged up Hamish wind up in a complicated dance, caught somewhere between trauma bonding and flirtation in a film that’s slow to reveal its hand. Their...
Jim Gaffigan stars as astronomer and public television personality Cameron Edwin in Colin West’s science fiction-tinged festival dramedy Linoleum. A bodega-version Bill Nye, Cameron leads the failing daily children’s show ‘Above & Beyond’ which after years of existing in obscurity has been picked up by a major network. The rub? Cameron will be replaced as...