After being presented with the text of an ancient scroll followed by establishing shots depicting the hellish landscape surrounding a sinister spire that looms over a monster-infested dystopian wasteland, it’s quite clear Phil Tippett’s epic stop-motion adventure Mad God is going to be an incredible sight to behold, a sentiment that remains true right up until the credits roll. This […]
Despite the absence of dialogue Carlos Conceição’s atmospheric thriller Name Above Title is bursting at the seams with style, from it’s brutally graphic murder sequences to the beautifully framed and lit shots showcasing the film’s unique setting of Lisbon, Portugal. Opening with the viewer following a heavily intoxicated young woman who’s stumbling around a high rise bar before she jumps […]
Working retail during the yearly “Black Friday” sales that in modern times start on Thanksgiving night is something almost anyone would agree is a nightmare. In Casey Tebo’s darkly comedic holiday horror film Black Friday it’s taken to the extreme, as this year’s festive bargain hunting is interrupted by a meteor shower that ends up unleashing a parasitic alien life […]
Sometimes a film comes along that ignores all the traditional methods of cinematic storytelling, opting for a more experimental take on delivering the narrative that really empowers it’s thematics. That’s most definitely the case with Johannes Grenzfurthner’s eerie psychological horror feature Masking Threshold which follows a singular protagonist, a nameless IT technician who’s taken time off work to conduct a […]
From the time the opening scene ends it’s clear that Randolph Zaini’s debut feature Preman is a heavily inspired martial arts action film taking queues from such predecessors as Timo Tjahjanto’s The Night Comes for Us and Gareth Evans’ The Raid, but dialing down the constant barrage of hyper-violent combat in favor of a more emotionally effective story. The narrative […]
One location films can be tricky to pull off, so it’s always interesting to see how complex the premise dares to be and if it manages to successfully deliver on it; Emily Bennett and Justin Brooks have opted for a highly minimalist effort on the production side with their debut feature Alone With You. Starring Bennett (The Blacklist, Chicago Fire) […]
A slew of well framed establishing shots linger on screen as the opening credits of Renata Pinheiro’s science fiction drama King Car flash across them, giving the viewer a vivid glimpse of the humble yet vast Brazilian city where the story takes place. Introduced to the main character via his birth in the backseat of a taxi owned by his […]
Exorcism movies are a dime a dozen these days, so to find one that generally works is a satisfying feeling. Alejandro Hidalgo’s sophomore feature The Exorcism of God doesn’t fully deliver in the narrative department, boasting an extremely unlikable main character that the viewer is pitted against from the opening scene, but it’s got some solid tension with great scares […]
Unmatched in their authenticity when executed well, found footage films have become a staple in the horror genre over the last few decades. Sarah Appleton and Phillip Escot’s new feature length documentary The Found Footage Phenomenon aims to catalog the life of this fascinating subgenre through an exploration of how it achieved it’s many successes and tracing the origins dating […]
Junta Yamaguchi saw time travel films and said “I can do that, and I can do it in one take” then proceeded to do exactly that with his debut feature Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes. The story follows Kato, the owner of a small Japanese cafe, who after closing up shop late one night and heading to his apartment upstairs […]