Stone Turtle has its UK première at Glasgow Film Festival 2023 “Same island, different myths,” comments Samad (Bront Palarae). After all, Turtle Stone Island is said to be uninhabited, but he has found Zahara (Asmara Abigail), her young niece Nika (Samara Kenzo) and a few other women living there – and while he has read…
Writer/director’s Zachary Donohue’s debut feature The Den (aka Hacked, 2013) was an innovative screen-life thriller, where ‘found footage’ sourced from webcams, CCTV and smartphone reveal the internet itself as an anonymous hunting ground for home invasion and horrific entrapment. Donohue’s latest work, The Unknowable, also pieces its narrative together from recordings if not quite found…
Something in the Dirt first published by Little White Lies, 23 Jan 2022 In Something In The Dirt, fifth feature of filmmakers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (Resolution, Spring, The Endless, Synchronic), we hear wind chimes before we see anything. These chimes hang outside a somewhat dingy apartment building in Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon, where feckless bartender Levi Danube (Benson) has just moved…
Alone (Seuls) first published by SciFiNow The stylised font of the original French title for Alone, Seuls, raises the second upstroke of the ‘u’ higher than the first, so that it is possible to discern, encoded in the end of the word, the vestiges of Ils, the title of David Moreau’s feature debut (called Them…
At the centre of Parallel Minds is a classic locked-room mystery. Some time not far into the future, Elise Perrott (Michelle Thrush) and her research assistant Margo Elson (Tommie-Amber Pirie) are racing to complete a pioneering technology called Red Eye – special contact lenses which enable people both to download their memories into a Universal…
Burning (Beoning) first published by VODzilla.co Burning (Beoning) opens in a shabby marketplace of brand knockoffs and tacky imitations that perfectly figures the low-rent gig economy in which two of the film’s three principal characters find themselves trapped. Aspiring novelist Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in) is delivering cheap goods to a shop when he runs into…
His Master’s Voice (Az Úr hangja) first published by Sight & Sound “It is in the quest for such knowledge that science is bringing us closer to an understanding of who and where we are,” says the host of a Sixties television programme about space exploration. “You were born into chaos. Those first days were…
Under The Silver Lake first published (in slightly shorter form) by VODzilla.co There is a whole subgenre of films set in Los Angeles – including Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd. (1950), Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential (1997), Tony Scott’s Domino (2005), Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (2006), Allen Coulter’s Hollywoodland (2006), Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice (2014), and…
Fire Lily (Tuliliilia) first published by EyeforFilm The fire lily from which Estonian writer/director Maria Avdjushko’s feature debut derives its title – and which appears at several junctures within the film – is, significantly, a hermaphroditic plant, both male and female, and capable of fertilising itself. This is one key (from a whole bunch) to…
Driving in desert well beyond the city limits during a storm at night, cab driver Harris (Gino Anthony Pesi) half-listens to different talk radio chatter about time-leaping aliens, the male urge to conquer, and the female desire for intimacy, before taking a sip from his water flask and picking up his fare right out in…
Concealed first published by RealCrime Magazine After moving to South Africa with his girlfriend Sally (Nadia Townsend), for the first time in six years actor Max (Simon Lyndon) returns to Sydney for an audition. Upon their arrival someone tampers with Sally’s luggage, and Max has the sense that they are being followed. So when, the…