The Ones Who Grieve (Les âmes en peine) North American première at Fantastic Fest, 18th Sept 2026 The Ones Who Grieve (Les âmes en peine) opens with two sequences playing in parallel. In the first, a middle-aged man (Thierry Frémont) with a prominent red beard carves a grotesque mask from wood, and is then seen…
“I’d shot every kind of firearm there is by the time I was 12,” are the first words uttered in Jethro Waters’ narrative feature debut Gunfighter Paradise, spoken in a voiceover (that will continue intermittently throughout the film) from protagonist Stoner (Braz Cubas) as he appears in wide shot walking across an autumnal field. These…
Before a young multi-cultural audience in an American university, Shaki Ramdas (Nikhil Prakash), a confident, clean-shaven professor of sociology and religious studies, is giving a lecture on the nature of faith. He even writes the word in big capitals on the blackboard and underlines them: FAITH. As he carefully disentangles religion from the other two…
The Unholy first published by Little White Lies, as the 76th entry in my Cinema Psychotronicum column Burt Reynolds used to tell an anecdote about how his initial disappointment at failing to win the part of Dr David Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) soon turned to gratification as he learned that Stanley Kubrick…
God Man Dog first published by Little White Lies “Even a rich man can’t tell the future,” says homeless, appetitive boy (Jonathan Chang) to devout trucker Yellow Bull (Jack Kao), who spends his time feeding stray dogs, mending abandoned Buddhist artefacts, and playing a costumed god on the festival circuit to raise money for a…
Carrie fist published by Little White Lies, as entry 48 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column “Red. I might have known it would be red.” So says Margaret White – note the colour-coded surname – a sexually repressed religious zealot (played by Piper Laurie) under whose rigidly controlling single parentage teenaged Carrie (Sissy Spacek) has been brought…