Fantasia International Film Festival (FIFF) - Hellbender is a coming-of-age tale with a creative occult twist. Loner Izzy (Zelda Adams) doesn’t worry about typical teenage problems, like school or boys. Instead, she has much larger identity issues. She discovers after eating a worm that she’s a hellbender, meaning she’s part witch, part demon, and part [...]

New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF) - For a sequel to work well, not only does it need to entertain, but it needs to flesh out the core characters, introduce some new ones, and deepen the storylines. The Fable: The Killer Who Doesn't Kill does just that. It makes great use of already established characters while [...]

Fantasia International Film Festival (FIFF) - Nothing goes right for Zorn (Matthew Gray Gubler) in writer/director Richard Bates Jr.’s offbeat comedy King Knight, which debuted at the Fantasia International Film Festival on Aug. 8. Zorn’s coven of weirdos wants to ditch him. His mother, Ruth (Barbara Crampton), thinks he worships Satan. His high priestess girlfriend, [...]

Fantasia International Film Festival (FIFF) - Tin Can is a lot of things. It’s a sci-fi mystery with body horror elements that echo David Cronenberg’s earliest work. It’s a timely thriller that speaks to our present moment, specifically COVID-19 and climate change. And at times, it’s a film not afraid to lean into some heavy [...]

True crime is so popular that it was inevitable a film would come out lampooning our culture's lust for grisly murders. Cue Faking a Murderer, a strangely endearing hybrid of horror and mockumentary that’s also part Catfish with a dash of Deliverance and Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. Even for the less [...]

Anyone who has sat in a filmmaking or creative writing class will relate to a scene or two in the quirky Man Under Table. The low-budget film is a mix of the theater of the absurd, dystopian drama, and a shrewd comedy on the nature of art and the struggles to create and find success. [...]

Whenever a filmmaker brings a lesser-known urban legend to the screen and spins an inventive story around folklore, I’m a fan. Kandisha does just that. In the process, it offers some of the best kills the genre has to offer thus far this year. Directed and written by Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, the duo [...]