Every Sundance review on Silver Screen Riot.
An ooey, gooey suburban creature feature about motherhood and maintaining the illusion of perfection, Hatching expertly blends the weirder side of horror with a deeper message. Motherhood – at any age – requires great sacrifice. It’s often nasty, inglorious business. Hatching is not elevated horror. Nor is it shlock. Instead, this Finnish import about a...
Mimmi (Aamu Milonoff) and Rönkkö (Eleonoora Kauhanen) are Finnish High School students and ride-or-die best friends. In Alli Haapasalo’s Girl Picture, the inseparable duo attend school before working together at the mall where they hawk smoothies with names like “It Takes Two to Mango” or “Just Breathe”. On the clock, they dish about romantic trysts...
When a red truck is left parked on her property, a public speaking professor inadvertently begins an escalating feud with two townie hunters. Based on the short story “Winter Light” by James Lee Burke, God’s Country is a frosty thriller about bad blood in the Alaskan backcountry where an attempt to be reasonable breaks down...
In the near future, a process called “replacement” allows dying individuals to clone themselves in Dual. The goal: their living loved ones will no longer have to miss them. When Sarah (Karen Gillan) starts vomiting blood one day and is told stiffly that she will assuredly die very soon, she decides to gift her loved...
Jesse Eisenberg‘s debut feature When You Finish Saving the World is a cantankerous study of an insufferable family trying – and failing – to live together peacefully. Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard) is pouty and dense. Evelyn (Julianne Moore) is self-important and overbearing. He livestreams his folksy music to an eclectic mix of international audience members for...
Take the helplessness you feel when you’re in a foreign country but don’t speak the language and add in an inattentive husband and a possible stalker and you have a formula for a very bad trip abroad. In Watcher, this is Julia’s life now. Stranded in Bucharest, Romania, the unemployed actress and wife to an...
July 17, 2014. Irka (Oksana Cherkashyna) and Tolik (Sergey Shadrin) live humbly in the Ukraine border town of the Donetsk, an Eastern region of disputed territory during the dawn of the Russian-Ukraine Donbas war in Klondike. They’re expecting a child. The film opens as the couple discuss birthing plans and getting somewhere safe to deliver the...
A one-of-a-kind allegorical delicacy, Fresh revels in taboo subjects to poke fun at the stomach-churning appetites of the modern dating world. A delirious mash-up of cheesy romance and body horror shlock, the debut film from Mimi Cave begins in deliciously grotesque fashion, showing flashes of both American Psycho and Martyrs as her devilish meat-cute puts...