Sean O. McGuiness’ She Listens Alone opens by introducing us to the life of its protagonist Sabrina Nolan (Alivia Levie). It is a life which comprises other people’s lives, seen and heard remotely on screen – and a life which is not turning out as expected, planned or desired, and which leaves her feeling unfulfilled…
Loner first published by DMovies.org, timed with its world première at Raindance Film Festival 2025 “This by the way, for anyone under the age of 18, is called a map,” says Angus Mattock (Charlie Robb) near the beginning of Loner, which Robb wrote and co-directed with Douglas Tawn. “It’s made of paper.” It is an…
A Mother’s Embrace (Abraço de Mãe) screens at the Imagine Fantastic Film Festival 2024, 28 Oct Filmmaker Cristian Ponce likes to look back. His feature debut History of the Occult (2020) harked back to a Buenos Aires stuck in an alternative monochrome 1987 – and his latest, A Mother’s Embrace (Abraço de Mãe), has a…
Stopmotion opens with the image of an object floating in space. It is just like the beginning of Eraserhead (1977), which later included some of its own stopmotion sequences – and much as David Lynch superimposed the bobbing face of his protagonist Henry Spencer over the planet to suggest that what we are seeing is…
“What if I told you there was something else here in the house, and it’s not me?” says Sonya (Georgia Eyers) to her visiting mother Laura (Angela Punch McGregor) near the beginning of Violett. This is the perfect set up for a small-town Australian gothic, where in fact it is not always so easy to…
Bad Things had its world première at Tribeca Film Festival 2023 Bad Things opens with a blonde woman carrying a chainsaw from a building across the snow to a car full of her friends. The woman is Ruthie Nodd (Gayle Rankin), the building is the hotel ‘Comley Suites’ in America’s Northeast that she has just…
Hotel Poseidon has its international première at Fantasia 2021 Sometimes a place can become part of the person that inhabits it. The very first thing that we see in writer/director Stefan Lernous’ feature debut Hotel Poseidon is a large dead fish in a half-empty tank of rancid water. It is as good an image as…
Violation first publsihed by Through The Trees, 13 September, 2020 Co-written and co-directed by Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer, Violation opens with the contrasting sounds of loons and baroque music, as a woozily abstract blurring of blues and greens slowly resolves itself into the image of a misty stone bridge over a woodland river. This…
Beast first published by RealCrime Magazine “You’ve got blood on your hands,” Moll (Jessie Buckley) tells Pascal (Johnny Flynn). They have just met, as he, toting a hunting rifle, has rescued her from being date-raped by a pickup from the nightclub. The blood, as Pascal points out, is from the rabbit that he just poached –…
Trash Fire (aka The Wrath) first published by VODzilla.co “Do you remember when we first met?” Isabel (Angela Trimbur) asks her boyfriend Owen (Adam Grenier) towards the end of Trash Fire (aka The Wrath). “You were the biggest piece-of-shit douchebag I had ever met, I could not stand you.” When we first meet Owen, as he, in the…
Sun Choke first published by VODzilla.co “It’s not a punishment. The rules were put in place for your protection, little girl. Everything we do, we do for you to get better… and you’ll feel so much better after.” The speaker is Irma (Barbara Crampton, Re-Animator, We Are Still Here, Road Games), a neatly dressed woman who…