Directed and co-written by Craig David Wallace Motherly is a 2021 hostage thriller that mixes murder and motherly love to create its twisted story. It may give off the air of being a Lifetime channel attempt at a horror movie, with the estranged husband plot device and the mother and daughter starting over in a [...]

An Intrusion lives up to its title in a number of different ways, with the plot of the film being about a home invasion and the sound design of the film including quite a few interruptions of jarring music and sounds that make one want to grind their teeth in agony. What's more, this film [...]

Written and directed by Leroy Kincaide in his feature film debut, The Last Rite is a possession film that deals with supernatural entities, exorcisms, precarious romantic relationships, and sleep paralysis. As an added layer, I felt this film also delved deeply into mental issues and childhood trauma, seeing its protagonist manifest past nightmares into existence [...]

For his new movie The Last Ghost Hunters, writer/director Dan T. Hall blends a mix of filming methods, genres, and aesthetics to form a style that is unique, albeit rather amateurish in its delivery. Despite its low budget, the film does feature some passable CGI to create the ghostly apparitions, as well as some truly [...]

Nightstream Film Festival (NFF) - Director Mads Hedegaard's documentary Cannon Arm and the Arcade Quest, which screened at the 2021 Nighstream Festival, has all the makings for an excellent documentary. A mysterious protagonist -- check. A premise that draws from nerdy and/or modern interests, i.e. gaming -- double check. Meltdowns, in this case, in the [...]

Nightstream Film Festival (NFF) - Satoshi Kon is one of the most iconic directors of all cinema history and has been influential to many modern-day directors. One of Japan's premier auteurs, Kon's style of animation as well as his tell-it-like-it-is way of living blazed new trails in a society that typically obligated citizens to play [...]

Cosmic Dawn is a 2021 Nighstream Film Festival feature that studies the complex feeling of connection -- from mother to daughter, from drug-use to emotional connectivity, and from humans to "occupants of interplanetary crafts". While its elements of psychedelia and extraterrestrials lend themselves to science fiction, Cosmic Dawn is just as much a psychological thriller [...]