Death Has No Master (La muerte no tiene dueño) North American première at Fantastic Fest, 18th Sept 2026 “There is no land. There is no God. There is no house. There is nothing.” So intones old Yoni (Arturo Rodríguez) at the beginning of Death Has No Master (La muerte no tiene dueño), even as we…
18 Holes to Paradise (18 Buracos para o Paraíso) had its world première at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, 13 Nov 2025 The opening credits of João Nuno Pinto’s 18 Holes to Paradise (18 Buracos para o Paraíso) play over a long series of shots showing Francisca (Margarida Marinho) driving her car along a dusty…
LandLord had its world première at Grimmfest, 10th Oct 2025 “Vampires aren’t real, kid,” says a Black, unnamed Bounty Hunter (newcomer Adama Abramson, in a very strong performance) to 12-year-old Alex (Cohen Cooper, also strong) after she has saved him from a home invasion in which his mother (Meredith Frankie Crutcher) was bloodily attacked and…
NoSeeUms had its world première at FrightFest 2025, Saturday 23 August “The land, the land knows you, even when you are lost” says a female voiceover at the beginning of Raven Deshay Carter’s NoSeeUms, as we see the image of a woman plummeting backwards in slow motion, surrounded by a swarm of insects. That image,…
Sue Parker (Willa Holland) tends bar in a small college town in North Louisiana. Here class divisions are demarcated by the river running through the town centre, with massive shoreline mansions on one side and trailers on the other. As Sue states in the voiceover which opens The Dirty South, this Bible Belt community is…
The Feast (Gwledd) first published by Sight & Sound, September 2022 Review: Over plain opening credits, birdsong and the bleating of sheep can be heard, sonically conjuring a rural idyll, before being interrupted first by the sound of a car arriving and then by the noise of a much louder motor. The source of that…
The Draughtsman’s Contract first published by Movie Gazette, 12 February 2004 After many years working as a documentary editor at the Central Office of Information, and over a decade making experimental mockumentaries (collected in The Early Films of Peter Greenaway 1 and The Early Films of Peter Greenaway 2), Peter Greenaway decided to turn his hand to a…
“Nice place to be homeless,” says Knox Bannett (Todd Grinnell), just after he has handed over a fiver to mendicant war veteran Rodney (Scott Anthony Leet) at the beginning of Martin Guigui’s Paradise Cove. The ‘nice place’ is Malibu, California, famed for its its extended coastal strip, its sun and its surf. Knox has arrived…
Mater first published by EyeforFilm at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2019 “I’m not leaving this house. Never.” The speaker is Anka (Neva Rosic), a crafty, cancerous, cantankerous old widow who maybe knows, maybe does not, that her adult daughter Jasna (Daria Lorenci) has come all the way from her own home in Berlin to…
A Bay of Blood (Ecologia del Delitto) first published by Little White Lies, as the 88th instalment of my Cinema Psychotronicum column Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood opens with a shadowy figure placing a low-hanging noose around the neck of elderly Countess Federica Donati (Isa Miranda) and kicking the wheelchair out from under her….