By Thomas M. Puhr. Sissy satisfies on most fronts, eliciting shocked guffaws and legitimate scares in equal measure. It’s easy to imagine it one day becoming something of a cult classic.” Cecilia seems to have it all. Her mental health video podcast, “Sincerely, Cecilia” – which includes episodes with titles […]
Resistance to Conformity: Eva Vitija’s Loving Highsmith (2022)
By Melanie Marotta. Ever since I was sixteen or seventeen, I’d – I’d get what is sometimes called creepy ideas.” (05:19-05:25) With Loving Highsmith (2022), writer and director Eva Vitija does what others have refused to do – she resists labeling Highsmith. Instead, by allowing her life to unfold, viewers […]
A Grim War Tale: Burial
By Elias Savada. Despite the director’s limited ability to handle low-budget action in his debut feature, his much more accomplished follow-up shows he still needs to work with better, less-confusing script material.” British filmmaker Ben Parker only has two features under his belt: The Chamber from 2017 and Burial, now […]
Bloody Family Reunion: Vincent Grashaw’s What Josiah Saw (2021)
By Thomas Puhr. In short, wildly inconsistent. But at its best, it’s something to behold; more akin to a Southern Gothic short story of the William Faulkner variety than a straight-up horror exercise.” Given its vaguely connected story threads – each of which varies considerably in quality – Vincent Grashaw’s […]
Awkward Love Blossoms in Goodbye, Petrushka
By Elias Savada. Nicola Rose’s first feature displays some grand baby steps towards a brighter future. You just have to accept the weird, brightly-colored yet sparse tableau she has drawn here.” For those of us who like romantic comedies, Goodbye, Petrushka falls amidst the genre’s smaller ones best described as […]
Blood and Guts, with Brains – Stuart Gordon: Interviews
A Book Review by Thomas M. Puhr. It’s hard to think of a genre filmmaker today capable of going so far out on the ledge of bad taste while maintaining an artistic skill that ranks them with the best of the horror masters. In this sense, Stuart Gordon remains one-of-a-kind: […]
Genre-Blending, Gender, and Subversive Views of Sexuality and Mental Health: Perspectives on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
A Book Review by M. Sellers Johnson. An engaging read for both longstanding fans of the show and first-time viewers.” Despite its deceptive title Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (CW, 2015-19) proves to be rather nuanced in its address to this ostensibly negative trope by examining issues of obsession, mental health, plurisexuality, and […]
All A-bored: Bullet Train
By Elias Savada. Style only goes so far in the case of Bullet Train. It can’t make up for all the other problems, especially the leaky script, self-destructing humor, and bland visual effects.” The bland zen-casual jokes that abound in Bullet Train — a boldly-stylized, hyper-exaggerated adaptation of popular Japanese […]
One Man’s Gutsy Final Journey – Jack Has a Plan
By Elias Savada. [With] a low-key ghoulish humor…Jack Has a Plan bookends the moments of Jack’s emotional departure with an audio-visual scrapbook of memories and some lovely discoveries.” There’s a low-key ghoulish humor that welcomes viewers to this documentary: “Formaldehyde Films Presents,” especially since this life-affirming story is all about […]
Not Alone: Akiko Ohku’s Tremble All You Want (Kani Releasing)
By Thomas Puhr. The kind of release that makes you appreciate the untapped reservoir (at least for Western audiences) that is contemporary world cinema, and wish for more home video releases like it.” When we first see Yoshika, she is knee deep in a quarter-life crisis. “I’m such a wimp!” […]