Images Courtesy Apple TV It’s rare for the sophomore season of a show to top its previous season, but it can happen: Justified, The Expanse, Schitt’s Creek, Fargo, and The Leftovers. Severance succeeds by avoiding the usual second-season traps and goes hard into developing its characters. Season two excels by using all of the show to further mature the Innies as people, giving them more humanity and agency.  A masterful first episode picks up where season one ends: the four macro data refiners were able to initiate the Overtime Contingency by waking up their Innies after hour ..read more

Horror or at least mid-70s horror often depicted the so-called hippie movement of the late 1960s much like the slasher horror tropes saw the fates of characters who engaged in premarital sex: ending in death.  Often the moral of the horror story involved the consequence free lifestyles circling back to bite those practicing it on the ass whether it involves sex or substance abuses.     The greatest fear purported by horror films such as William Friedkin’s The Exorcist or in David Cronenberg’s first two features was the notion of an outside force taking control over one’s own ..read more

Images courtesy of Eureka Entertainment Amid the ongoing battle between Shaw Scope and Golden Harvest for being the top Hong Kong martial arts action entertainment empire with each company doling out their respective subgenre iterations, a curious union began among several of its top billing stars following the release of Chang Cheh’s Five Deadly Venoms.  Prominently featuring Philip Kwok, Lu Feng, Chiang Sheng, Sun Chien, Lo Mang and Wei Pai, the film sparked one of several collaborative efforts featuring aptly named Venom Mob fighting together in unison as a Hong Kong and T ..read more

Images courtesy of Troma Entertainment The face and patina of Lloyd Kaufman’s fifty-year-old independent film production company Troma Entertainment has changed considerably since it first originated in 1974.  Often making B-exploitation pictures on the cheap and quick, usually channeling the energies of 1950s horror movies while amping up the gore levels and politically incorrect transgressions, Troma based on the Greek word tromos meaning ‘horror’ and its frontman Lloyd Kaufman have seen fit to offer a unique frequently hilarious, grungy and gritty antidote to popular mains ..read more

Images courtesy of Netflix The Russo Bros. return with their latest Netflix entry, The Electric State. The film which is the streaming giant's highest budget production at over $320 million dollars is a creatively bankrupt visual spectacle that abandons the talents of Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt and trades them in for baseline entertainment that really lacks any semblance of heart.  Attempting to cash in on the '80s sci-fi vibe, The Electric State is a watchable bit of late Saturday night escapism, but shirks any good will that the Russos had left over from their Marvel ..read more

  Images Courtesy of The Unity Group A somber fever dream of witchcraft and trauma, Abbey Brenker and Ellyn Vander Wyden's feature film Voices Carry debuted at Cinequest 2025 last evening.    Mixing independent sensibilities, esoteric underpinnings, and a bravura central performance, this is one of the most memorable films of the year thus far.    A couple, Sam and Jack, retreat to a family homestead to find a renewal to their relationship, unwittingly releasing ghosts of the past that may or may not be real.  As things progress, Sam beg ..read more

Images courtesy of Paramount Actor Jack Quaid is perhaps best known for his role as Hughie in the ultraviolent superhero show The Boys, where people with superpowers commit atrocious crimes and are caught in lewd acts aplenty. While Quaid’s character often takes second fiddle to many of the other over-the-top characters on the show, he’s finally been given a chance to shine with a “superpower” of sorts, and this time it’s on the big screen. Novocaine follows in the gory yet comedic spirit of The Boys with an essence all its own. In the film, Quaid plays Nate: a nerdy banker who’s a ..read more

Images courtesy of Eureka Entertainment Hong Kong based director-producer Johnnie To goes back as far as 1980 with his debut feature The Enigmatic Case before working his way up into the international mainstream circuit as an action-crime filmmaker with Breaking News, Mad Detective and Drug War.  Around 1996, the director co-founded his own production company Milkyway Image with Peace Hotel writer-director Wai Ka-fai and together they collaborated on eleven features, the tenth of which Running on Karma comes to blu-ray disc for the first time via Eureka Entertainment with a n ..read more

Images Courtesy of Good Deed Entertainment Films about eating disorders are exceptionally rare, and even more so are films that not only explore the disease but those who do so with a unique and fresh approach.  Robert McCaskill's feature film, Hungry tackles the difficult subject matter by way of a High School wrestling coach who not only struggles with his own demons, but those of his friends, family, and students.  A mature screenplay with gut wrenching emotion, a devoted cast, and quickfire editing combine to create a memorable, if somewhat languid fever dream about th ..read more

Images courtesy of Mosfilm While actress and film director Yuliya Solntseva was undeniably Russian, her husband and creative partner was Ukrainian film directing titan Aleksandr Dovzhenko and initially they began as wartime documentary filmmakers with 1943’s Ukraine in Flames before mounting her first standalone feature as a director with 1958’s Poem of the Sea.  A 35mm production that is regarded as the first of what would or wouldn’t become the director’s ‘Ukrainian Trilogy’, it was intended to be a Dovzhenko film but he passed away in 1956 right before cameras were set to ..read more