When the Marquis d’Urfé, a noble emissary of the King of France, is attacked and abandoned in the remote countryside, he finds refuge at an eerie, isolated manor. The resident family, reluctant to take him in, exhibits strange behavior as they await the imminent return of their father, Gorcha. But what begins simply as strange quickly devolves into a full fledged nightmare when Gorcha returns, seemingly no longer himself...   Adapted from a novella that predates Bram Stoker’s Dracula by over half a century, The Vourdalak is an atmospheric, unexpected, sensorial experience that will leave ..read more

In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we look at several music videos for Sleater-Kinney, directed by Miranda July. Miranda July has been called the epitome of quirk and twee to the extent of annoying. She has her detractors, who think her style of video art, performance art and filmmaking is insufferable. So much so that almost every big piece and interview on her, gives a lot of time to the people who don't like her, and the reasons why. I'm guilty of this myself, by starting the article this way, as I'm a fan and a defender ..read more

Here's one for the little guys, or, it's the little things that matter the most, or ... ...   Deadline has reported this weekend that the Canadian slasher flick, In A Violent Nature, gave IFC Films it's latest, biggest opening of the year just a little behind its current specialty box office champ, Late Night With The Devil. Compared to wide releases $2.1 million may not seem like a lot, but it was enough to place the indie horror flick in the top ten box office.    In A Violent Nature “has been steadily making waves for redefining the classic slasher genre” since its Sundance ..read more

Screambox has announced their lineup for the month of June. The big tickets draws are Frogman, Coherence and We Need to Talk About Kevin.    If you realized after seeing Immaculate that you need to catch up on the Sydney Sweeney back catalogue Screambox is here to help with John Carpenter's The Ward.   Director John Schnitzer may have turned to a life of stand-up comedy but you can watch his haunted house documentary Haunters: The Art of the Scare next month.    Anna Biller's The Love Witch was a production designer's wet dream. If you haven't seen it you can cat ..read more

Three entries in, and Ti West's horror-porno hybrid franchise (X, Pearl, Maxxxine) knows that its secret weapon is Mia Goth's "uncanny-valley" smile. This poster leans into it fully, with the Hollywood stage lights, the glossy glamour of the design referencing the films tinseltown setting as a backdrop, and a golden highlight.  The triple X in the title serves several purposes. First, a nod the VHS horror boom in the 1980s (when Maxxxine takes place) where every tape was labelled XXX to capitalize on the American Motion Picture Ratings Association's addition of the X, which mean adults o ..read more

At every step in Joachim Rønning’s (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, Kon-Tiki) gripping old-school adaptation of Glenn Stout’s non-fiction book, Young Woman and the Sea, Daisy Ridley’s based-on-real-life Gertrude “Trudy” Ederle faces a whole host of obstacles, only one greater and more significant than the treacherous 21-mile-long English Channel Ederle hoped to cross almost a century ago: the invisible patriarchal structure that surrounds Trudy, threatening to suffocate her aquatic dreams. When we first meet Trudy, she’s face-to-face with the cr ..read more

One of the great, tragic flaws of the human race is locked up in our inability to think beyond our familiar scale of time; like the slow blades that slip the shields in Dune, gradual problems -- even if ultimately fatal -- are difficult for us to reckon with for their seeming lack of immediate urgency. Now, staged against geologic time, even the timescales of the climate catastrophe are negligibly short. An Inconvenient Truth was released just 20 years ago, after all, and human science only began to point towards the damage we were doing to our ecosystem thirty years before that. For a human ..read more

Antoine Chevrollier's debut feature film navigates the emotional landscape of teenage life, exploring themes of masculinity, parenthood, identity, and the societal pressures of a small-town upbringing. [Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com ..read more

Without much expectation – because Revenge, director Coralie Fargeat's debut film, wasn’t as thrilling to me as to most genre cinema specialists – I went to a night screening of The Substance at the Cannes International Film Festival. The decision was a very pleasant surprise, like a shot of adrenaline that lasted almost two and a half hours, given that the movie is stylish – constant closeups, energetic editing, loud sound – and quite intense from beginning to end, funny, grotesque, and over-the-top. The Substance attracted me right away because it belongs to the traditional cinema about Hol ..read more

French director Boris Lojkine navigates the harsh realities of undocumented life in Paris, blending social realism with the tension of a high-stakes thriller. [Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com ..read more