This mid-series run of Murderbot is some of the tightest episodes of television in a while. This episode also contains a great deal of humour, backrubs, some awfully graphic surgery, and then some even more graphic violence. The tonal shifts flow more naturally than that description sounds, which is especially …
Dui Shaw, courtesy of Bangladeshi writer-director Nuhash Humayun – who made history as the first filmmaker from Bangladesh to cop an Oscar nomination for the post-apocalyptic short film Moshari (2022), executive produced by horror master Jordan Peele and Sound of Metal star Riz Ahmed – locates grimy, cyclic folklores in …
Every Heavy Thing, the latest feature from prolific indie auteur Mickey Reece which just had its world premiere at Fantasia 2025, is a pulsing technothriller propelled by daring Lynchian experimentations. Essentially, it feels like a standalone Black Mirror episode reckoning with the threat of Big Tech in American suburbs. Mounted …
Touch Me is the sophomore effort by Addison Heimann. The director premiered with Hypochondriac, a 2022 release. His new film is another addition to the tendency of contemporary horror films to use genre conventions to tackle trauma and abuse. In his latest film, Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) is a traumatized …
My kids never experienced a school shooting, but one year, there was a credible threat of a weapon at their high school. My youngest caught wind of the danger and left before the school went on lockdown, walking a couple of miles home because they had no intention of dying …
Japanese director Takashi Miike is one of the most prolific directors alive. In 2025, he released three films: Shin Abarenbo Shogun, Sham, and Blazing Fists. He is known for his signature in his work, which usually merges genres. In Blazing Fists, Miike crafts a martial arts film that combines fighting, …
Brock Bodell’s feature directorial debut, Hellcat, which made its world premiere at the 2025 Fantasia International Film Festival, is a chamber survival horror-thriller that manages to be effectively tense and visceral despite a premise that we’ve come across a few too many times before. Produced and shot entirely in Nashville, …
$POSITIONS is the debut feature by Brandon Daley, after his three short films: Savasana (2015), Chicken Tuesdays (2017), and Technology Lake: Meditations on Death and Sex (2019). In his first feature directorial effort, the director explores the world of cryptocurrencies and the allure of making easy money online. He sets …
The American indie director Albert Birney has had a prolific career in the last few years. He is releasing his sixth feature film, OBEX. Birney released before Strawberry Mansion, Tux and Fanny, Sylvio, Eyeballs in the Darkness, and The Beast Pageant. The director uses the 1980s setting to tell his …
A horror-comedy that perfectly evokes the schlocky charm and madness of B-movies has been a rare sight since the last decade, save of course for Shin’ichirō Ueda’s 2017 low-budget film-within-a-film comedy, One Cut of the Dead, the last ingenious and delightfully funny effort I could name and recommend. Something you …
Lurker is the debut feature by Alex Russell. He is an Emmy winner for his work as a supervising producer in Netflix’s miniseries, Beef. Besides the show with Ali Wong and Steve Yeun, the young screenwriter penned episodes of FX’s Dave and The Bear. In 2017, Russell wrote a feature …
There are movies, and there are movies, and then there are the wild and experimental films that use the cinematic form to tell a story in a way that only filmmaking can. Buffet Infinity is one of this third type. Set in a small town in Alberta, Canada, Buffet Infinity …
Academy Award-winning director Kevin MacDonald has returned to documentary filmmaking after a series of fiction works, including The Mauritanian and How I Live Now, among others. His last three works were documentaries: High and Low – John Galliano, Last Song From Kabul, and One to One: John & Yoko. In …
The line between a relationship where you rely on your partner in healthy ways and a codependent one, where you are unable to function without the other person, is shockingly thin. In the new film Together, writer and director Michael Shanks examines enmeshment in a much more literal way, to varying degrees …
Based on the novel of the same name by Jordan Harper, She Rides Shotgun follows Nate McClusky (Taron Egerton, Rocketman), an ex-convict who is forced to kidnap his 11-year-old daughter, Polly (Ana Sophia Heger), to protect her from a hit order issued by a neo-Nazi gang after Nate killed their …
Over the decades, slapstick comedy and deadpan humor have become increasingly rare. In a cinematic landscape where physical satire and innocent laughter have given way to biting irony or postmodern self-referential humor, the return of the The Naked Gun franchise feels like a breath of fresh air… or, forgive me, …
Before the review begins: an apology. I originally misgendered Murderbot in my reviews of the previous four episodes, which have now been corrected. A publicist got in touch to inform us that Murderbot has no gender; I should not have presumed the gender of the human actor playing it had …
There are films that, regardless of their cinematic quality, earn a very special place in the hearts of audiences. Happy Gilmore (1996), starring Adam Sandler and co-written with Tim Herlihy, is one such case. Much like many of Sandler’s comedies from the ’90s and early 2000s, it didn’t stand out …
In Irish folklore, the presence of a banshee symbolises the impending death of a family member. On Inisherin, a small island off the coast of Ireland, where everyone knows everyone, everyone is family. No one in this macabre comedy is safe from the wail of The Banshees of Inisherin. April …
After the laugh-a-minute riot that was Booksmart, Olivia Wilde turns her attention away from comedy to attempt a pulpy, adult thriller in the form of Don’t Worry Darling, a film that embodies the notion of sophomore slump as it wears its message on misogyny loudly, proudly and with a nuanced …