This review of Lilya 4-Ever is so ancient I have lost all record of where it was originally published. Would write this very differently now… If Lukas Moodysson‘s previous film, Together (2000), showed how communal living can offer a shelter from the world’s disharmonies, then his new film Lilya 4-Ever portrays the very opposite: how…
Monsters Club first published by Little White Lies, as entry 138 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column By the time Monsters Club came out, writer/director Toshiaki Toyoda and the actor Eita had history. After all, Eita made his big-screen debut in Toyoda’s Blue Spring (2001), and then had also starred in his 9 Souls (2003) and…
Everyone Will Burn (Y todos arderán) had its UK première at FrightFest 2022 Like David Hebrero’s debut feature Dulcinea (2019), his follow-up Everyone Will Burn (Y todos arderán), co-written with Javier Kiran, concerns a would-be suicide, and uses genre to explore the ramifications of this damning desire. A brief text introduces us to the small…
We Had It Coming opens with two programmatic sequences. In the first, Katja (Sofie Holland) is woken by the sound of a hardcore porn clip landing on her phone – a video in which, by implication, she features. She then, after grimly donning the transparent platform shoes that are part of her work costume, hangs…
The Kindred has its world première at FrightFest 2021 Jamie Patterson’s The Kindred opens with Helen Tullet (April Pearson) – although we do not yet know her name – running through the otherwise empty corridors of London’s Trellick Tower, clutching her belly and looking constantly back behind her, in a clear state of distress. By…
Woodshock first published by VODzilla.co “Remember when we used to play in the woods together. I got lost that one summer. When I turned around, you were gone. When they found me, I almost didn’t want to come back.” These words which introduce Woodshock – accompanied by abstract images of Theresa (Kirsten Dunst) alone among…
As the titles from his filmography – Life Between the Waters (2017), The Forgotten Mountain (Mali i Harrum, 2018) and Encounter in the Air (2019) – suggest, Albanian writer/director Ardit Sadiku is an auteur of the elements. His sophomore feature opens with a spectacular vista of the sublime, in a montage of aerials revealing cloud-girt…
It’s not every film that is prefaced with text showing a legitimate toll-free number to call (in Canada) “if you or someone you know might be at risk of self-harm or self-injury” – but then, Dead Dicks opens with a graphic depiction of suicide, as Richie (Heston Horwin, Rock Steady Row), alone among the fractured…
Adapted from Sebastian Fitzek and Michael Tsokos’ best selling novel Abgeschnitten (2012), Cut Off (Abgeschnitten) takes its writer/director Christian Alvart back to the serial killer psychothriller terrains of his earlier feature Antibodies (Antikörper, 2005). The film’s opening premise is as high-concept as they come: Paul Herzfeld (Moritz Bleibtreu), a divorced professor of forensic pathology working…
Potential Victim (Victima Potencial) first published by EyeforFilm Positing an iconic star as vampiric avatar of the internet age, Potential Victim (Victima Potencial) is both postmodern experiment and extended music video. Chilean singer Sofía Oportot plays a version of herself, sustained, perhaps for eternity, by the dissemination online of her image and music by younger…
La Grande Bouffe first published by VODzilla.co Written in 1785, but not published until 1904, the Marquis de Sade’s notorious novel The 120 Days of Sodom became an instant cause célèbre for its sometimes moralising, sometimes glorifying depiction of four well-to-do middle-aged gentlemen enacting a four-month orgy of lust, perversion and murder upon an ensemble…