8:37 Rebirth opens with a bang that will reverberate throughout the film. In a Turkish-owned corner store in the City of Halifax, Nova Scotia, we see nine-year-old Sergei Radic (Benjamin Walker) staring in horror, and 18-year-old, bloody-faced Jared Peters (Kylar Johnson) holding a gun. At first the incident itself is not shown, just its immediate…
Identity is everything. Amid the FrightFests and Grimmfests, the Mayhems and the Celluloid Screams, the Fractured Visions, Abertoirs and Cine-Excesses, it is hard for a new genre festival to carve out its own niche: to jump out when least expected and grab the attention. The Soho Horror Film Festival is ‘amateur’ in the true sense…
“Tigers don’t change their stripes,” Dennis Lotz (Scott Friend) tells his wife Mia (Madeleine Morgenweck) of his estranged older brother Roger (Will Brill) in writer/director Friend’s feature debut To The Moon. Vacationing upstate for the weekend at a remote lakeside summer house built by Dennis’ late grandfather, the couple hopes for some time together to…
“Narcissists are the ones who make it,” complains Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp, Ninjababy, 2021) at a party near the beginning of Sick of Myself (Syk Pike), unable to recognise – as all her friends do – that, despite not making it, she is herself a narcissist. She lives with artist du jour Thomas (Erik Sæther),…
Rising once again from New York’s subways and sewers, the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival is nearly upon us. For eight days commencing Thursday 13th October, the festival will present an eclectic melting pot of grue, gore, goo and guffaws, as genre takes over the borough. This year opens with the world première of cross-cultural folk…
Wild Bones opens with Fay (Roxy Bugler), and makes it clear that we are not just in her isolated environment – a remote stone cottage on the coast during winter – but also in her addled headspace. To the sonic accompaniment of the wind howling outside and Ross Oliver’s ritualistic percussive score (think Toru Takemitsu,…
You Resemble Me opens with an alarming image. A young girl leans over a highrise apartment balcony, her feet off the floor, evidently flirting with the idea of flinging herself headfirst onto the concrete far below – before she pulls herself back from the brink, and rejoins her family. This is little Hasna (Lorenza Grimaudo),…
Back in 1970, Crimes of the Future was in fact David Cronenberg’s second feature – but since then both he and the future have changed considerably, and accordingly his latest feature of the same title is in fact an entirely different film, even if it looks back to motifs from his earlier films, especially Rabid…
Julia first published by Film4 Summary: French director Erick Zonca has crafted a tale of alcoholism, abduction and alienation in L.A. and across the border. Tilda Swinton stars. Review: Make a movie about an aging alcoholic, and you ought to have a tragic drama, like Le Feu Follet (1963), Trees Lounge (1996) or Factotum (2005)….
The Proposition first published by EyeforFilm, 10 Mar 2006 John Hillcoat‘s brutal 1988 directorial debut,Ghosts… Of The Civil Dead, co-starring Goth/blues/ punk genius Nick Cave (who also shared credits for the screenplay and score) was then, and still remains, the grittiest, most hard-hitting prison film ever made. So expectations were raised very high when it…
In Graham Baker’s Impulse (1984), toxic waste leaks into a rural town’s milk supply, causing the residents to lose all their inhibitions and to pursue their most violent or sexually taboo urges without censorship. Where Baker’s film was an apocalyptic sci-fi thriller, Love In Kilnerry tells a similar story in an entirely different genre. For…