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Stars: Theo Christine, Sofia Lesaffre, Jerome Niel, Lisa Nyarko, Finnegan Oldfield, Marie-Philomene Nga, Mahamadou Sangare, Abdallah Moundy, Ike Zacsongo-Joseph, Emmanuel Bonami, Xing Xing Cheng, Samir Nait, Malik Amraoui | Written by Sébastien Vanicek, Florent Bernard | Directed by Sébastien Vanicek

Arachnophobes are in for a bit of a rough time, because streaming platforms and cinemas will be positively crawling with spider-based monster movies before you know it. Well, two, anyway. First up is French spider-thriller Infested (out now on Shudder), with Australian creature feature Sting creeping into cinemas on May 31st.

Also known as Vermines, Infested is the feature debut of French director Sebastien Vanicek. Set in present-day Paris, the film centres on hustler Kaleb (Theo Christine), who shares a flat with his sister Manon (Lisa Nyarko) in a run-down apartment building that’s home to several other multicultural tenants.

When exotic animal enthusiast Kaleb brings home an illegal spider, he names...

Director Sébastien Vaniček has been set to helm the next Evil Dead movie, and it’s easy to see why with his feature debut, the spider horror movie Infested. Playing like a cross between Attack the Block and Arachnophobia, Infested makes you care about its characters while delivering no shortage of skin-crawling spider horror moments.

Available now on Shudder, Infested follows Kaleb (Théo Christine), a lonely 30 year old who’s estranged from his best friend and at odds with his sister over their crumbling apartment. His dreams of opening a reptile zoo get drastically thwarted when he brings home an illegally acquired desert spider, one that happens to be gravid, and it gets loose. One hatched egg sac gives way to hundreds more, plunging the apartment building into a visceral arachnophobic nightmare.

It’s not just that Infested employs real spiders for many of the skin-crawling horror moments that make it so effective,...

Frustrated with the lack of diversity and inclusion in the French film industry, 16 black actresses took to the red carpet in Cannes on Wednesday night, staging a protest against racism just days after 82 women, led by Cannes jury president Cate Blanchett, launched their own call for gender equality.

Led by actress Aïssa Maïga (“Bamako”), the group struck a defiant note while promoting a new book, “Noire N’est Pas Mon Métier” (My Profession is Not Black), which Maïga co-authored.

Speaking with Variety, the actress called it “a historic moment” as 16 black women linked arms on the red carpet outside the Palais for the first time. “It was beyond my wildest dreams,” she said. “For 20 years, I’ve been acting, and I’ve never felt like this.

“This was a statement we wanted to make to the entire world.”

The book features candid stories about the prejudice faced by black actresses in the French film industry.