Halloween Treats: "Red Rooms" is the year's best scare

by Nick Taylor

As you may remember from last week, I made a threat and promise to talk about contemporary horror this October. We’ve arrived. Hands down the best horror film I’ve seen from this year is the Canadian thriller Red Rooms, a 2023 release by Pascal Plante that’s just completed a months-long journey across festivals and art house cinemas before arriving in your hard drives through a menacing mp4 file. It’s a nasty, skin-crawling film, diving into the world of true crime prurience and online torture porn through the vantage of one of the year’s most intimidating performances. Wanna know more? Follow me under the cut...

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Venice 2023: The latest films from Luc Besson and Isabelle Huppert

by Elisa Giudici

Caleb Landry Jones in "Dogman"

We seem to have a new Joker on our hands, or at the very least, a new contender like The Whale, I'm afraid. To be fully transparent, I despised the former and adored the latter. Luc Besson's Dogman treads toward a similar future: it will deeply move some audience members and prompt visceral aversion in the others...

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Streaming: Keira Knightley in "The Boston Strangler"

by Matt St Clair

Dynamic of an actress as she may be, Keira Knightley remains quite stuck in the past. As she brilliantly makes each role she plays her own, she consistently transports us into different time periods whether it’s WWII (Atonement, The Aftermath), 5th century AD (King Arthur), or 18th century England (The Duchess). This time around, Knightley is taken to the early 1960s in Boston Strangler, the new journalism crime drama written and directed by Matt Ruskin (Crown Heights)... 

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Cannes Diary #6: Something weird this way comes

by Elisa Giudici

This (unconscious?) cosplay of Jesse Buckley doing Paul Verhoeven’s The 4th Man during the Q&A session for Men made my day!  After the jump some surreal comedy, a horror oddity, a terrifying thriller that might contend for awards, and a directorial debut... 

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Review: Sebastian Stan devours horror-romance 'Fresh'

by Matt St Clair

The new horror/romance hybrid Fresh chiefly functions as a viable kidnapping thriller that still  gets one thing right about our modern dating scene. It can be a literal terror show. It’s especially horrifying in our era of dating apps. The constant hoping for a companion as you keep sending messages saying “Hello” that get no response can make you wonder if people read the actual profile. It’s easy to judge a book by its cover and message someone based on how they look in their photo. But do people bother to read our bios for a better idea on what we might be like? 

As Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones) finds out the hard way, meeting people in real life can be just as rough...

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