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Gazer, at its core, is a film about voyeurism and humanity’s innate compulsion to not just want to be voyeurs, but to understand and make sense of the people who are being spied on. People, by nature, have an urge to act as a storyteller and connect disparate ideas, even if they don’t naturally go together. There’s a very human desire to do these things and apply logic and reason to a species that can be inherently chaotic, messy, and illogical. There are definitely pangs of Rear Window in Gazer. In fact, the film feels like a very post-modern deconstruction of many of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, albeit with a more horror-centric slant. However, there are also traces of other polarizing character studies like Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, or Chan Wook-park’s Decision to Leave. Gazer is about making sense of madness...

It’s rare when a ripped-from-the-headlines adaptation fails to capitalize upon the wilder, weirder aspects of its real-life counterpart. Yet that’s what happens in the case of director Austin Peters’ “Skincare,” which, to be fair, only claims to be a fictionalized version of the true-crime story of a successful celebrity aesthetician who allegedly hired a hitman to take out her competition. What’s there borrows from the real scandal to lightly explore the feminine rage, jealousy and paranoia festering underneath a girl-boss gloss so prevalent in the early 2010s. Through slick aesthetics bolstered by a sensational soundscape, the filmmakers build an entrancing, atmospheric mood piece. But given a few of its omissions, it’s questionable why the storytellers didn’t go in for the kill.

Skin is fragile (it’s the largest organ in the human body), tasked with keeping us healthy and in one piece. It’s no...

Though his personal tragedies and demons have sometimes overshadowed his work, there’s no denying the impact Oscar-winning director Roman Polanski has had on cinema.

Born in 1933 in Paris and raised in Poland, Polanski’s childhood was marked by tragedy when he was separated from his parents during the Holocaust. As a child, he escaped the Krakow ghetto after his mother was killed in an Auschwitz gas chamber. When the war ended, he was reunited with his father and returned home.

He turned to filmmaking as a student, making his directorial debut with the international hit “Knife in the Water” (1962), which earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. His followup, the psychological thriller “Repulsion” (1965), was an even bigger hit, and he was soon drafted by Hollywood to direct the occult horror film “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968), which earned him a Best Adapted Screenplay bid.

It was during this time that he married Sharon Tate,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook on Twitter and Instagram.NEWSMy Life as a Dog.Amid concerns over new provisions for AI, IATSE members have voted to ratify their new three-year contract with AMPTP, which includes a historic 40 percent raise for television and theatrical costume designers.Meanwhile, Teamsters Local 399 “remain far apart” on terms after five weeks of bargaining, reporting that “this was the first week in which we saw the employers take this process seriously.” Their current contract will expire on July 31, after which the union could strike.The Swedish motion-picture industry is calling for a change to the state’s “first-come, first-served” funding process, which most recently distributed all available funds in one minute and seven seconds.Germany plans to nearly double its national film funding...

Yvonne Furneaux, the glamorous actress who had memorable performances in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Le Amiche, Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, has died. She was 98.

Furneaux died July 5 at her home in North Hampton, New Hampshire, of complications from a stroke, her son, Nicholas Natteau, told The Hollywood Reporter.

She also was the female lead in the Hammer horror film The Mummy (1959), starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Though she considered the project less than ideal, she said she ultimately learned from those actors that “if you don’t take a film like The Mummy seriously and put your heart and soul into it, then you can bring it down,” she explained in Mark A. Miller’s 2010 book, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing and Horror Cinema.

She starred in Italian, French, German and Spanish films during her career.

In Le Amiche (1955), a hit at the...

We don’t know why Texas and California, under the banner of the “Western Forces,” have joined against the so-called “Florida Alliance” in a secession-fractured America in “Civil War.” But we can imagine it.

Director Alex Garland situates his defused bomb of a new movie — it’s more reflective and observant than in-the-trenches terrifyingly immersive — against a backdrop of dystopian dictatorship, extremist paramilitary groups, and journalism as a fading hope. In other words, a world so familiar to our own on the eve of a possible Donald Trump re-election and still in the shadow of his last term. Yet the shape of “Civil War” — which follows a photojournalist named Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and her Reuters colleagues from New York into a martial law-ravaged Washington, D.C. — could fit any autocrat story.

“The film is trying to function a bit like the reporters in the story, so it’s just showing...

We're big fans of the horror genre here at /Film. In my humble opinion, it's the best of the film genres — one that can be molded, sculpted, and altered to fit into different-sized packages. Horror can be therapeutic. It can elicit emotions in us that remind us we're still alive and kicking. Like Nicole Kidman in that annoying AMC ad, we come to this place for magic. We come to horror movies to love, to cry, to care. Because we need that, all of us. With that in mind, we're unleashing a new monthly feature where we highlight the best horror movies to stream this month. So let's get ready to scream/stream.

Read more: The 15 Best Horror Movie Directors Of All Time

Late Night With The Devil

Streaming on Shudder April 19.

A horror mockumentary that plays its cards just right, "Late Night With the Devil" is one of the...

Tom Priestley, the British film editor whose work assembling the dueling-banjos sequence and hellish “squeal like a pig” attack in John Boorman’s Deliverance landed him an Oscar nomination, has died. He was 91.

His death on Christmas Day was only recently revealed.

Priestley also cut two other movies helmed by Boorman: Leo the Last (1970), which won the best director award at the Cannes Film Festival, and Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977).

He also edited The Great Gatsby (1974); Blake Edwards’ The Return of the Pink Panther (1975); That Lucky Touch (1975), starring Roger Moore; Voyage of the Damned (1976), featuring an all-star cast; and Roman Polanski’s Tess (1979).

Priestley was the only son of renowned British novelist and playwright J.B. Priestley, who wrote the classic 1945 drama An Inspector Calls for the theater and served as a BBC Radio broadcaster during the Dunkirk evacuation of World War II.

Upon its release in 1972, Deliverance became the...

It’s fair to say Sydney Sweeney is having a moment right now. The young actor has been on the cusp of legitimate stardom for a few years after doing memorable work on HBO’s Euphoria and the first season of The White Lotus—although it was her little-seen foray into verbatim cinema via Tina Satter’s Reality that really impressed us. But after Anyone But You turned out to be the sleeper box office hit of the holiday season, with the picture grossing $101 million worldwide as of press time, it seems Sweeney has finally broken through, and she has the social media stanning over a Hot Ones appearance to prove it.

Which might be a longer way of saying Sweeney’s current rise brings a lot of attention to her next project, and luckily for genre fans it is a devilishly good-looking chiller by the name of Immaculate. A...

One of the great unsung traditions of horror is a character’s external environment reflecting their internal state. It has found its way into films as diverse as Repulsion (1965), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), and Relic (2020) to name just a few. Edgar Allan Poe was hardly the first to use the device, it had been a feature of the Gothic romances popular in the decades before him, but Poe moved it from character-deepening subtext to overt metaphor in his short story “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

Roger Corman’s 1960 film adaptation of the story latches onto and expands this and several of Poe’s obsessions into what has become a classic of slow-burning terror. The Fall of the House of Usher is the first in what has come to be called the Corman Poe Cycle. These eight films produced between 1960 and 1964 are among the most stylish,...

For an admirer of his work, writing about a new movie by Roman Polanski is like facing a minefield of unsolvable questions: Can this film be judged like the others given the director’s criminal record and tarnished reputation? Is it possible to praise a work of art if certain parts of an artist’s life are reprehensible, or should the two be separated? Should Polanski still be allowed to make movies? Should this movie even be written about?

Those questions would be harder to answer if Polanski, who’s now 90, made something on the level of say, Chinatown or Rosemary’s Baby. Or even something like The Tenant or Frantic or Repulsion or his debut feature, Knife in the Water, which came out over 60 years ago and earned him his first Oscar nomination.

But the director’s latest, The Palace, leaves little room for ambiguity. It’s the worst thing...

Filmmakers in the horror genre often place socio-political commentary in their movies, and usually, it works way better that way as opposed to having addressed it directly in a didactic drama. The new movie Pollen by writer-director D.W. Medoff is an interesting indie horror film that tries to tackle sensitive issues such as sexual assault, mental health, toxic work culture, and the overall alienation of young individuals using the already established intriguing tropes of the mystery and horror genres.

Borrowing from Polanski’s 1965 classic Repulsion but giving it a botanical twist, Pollen keeps the viewers engaged throughout its one-and-a-half-hour runtime. Hera, a young adult who lives alone in a cabin-like house near the woods and works in a competitive finance company, gets sexually assaulted by the finance lead, and her life from then on becomes a series of traumatic events, worsened by her fixation on a plant that was gifted to her by her abuser.

The anticipation Valeria feels about the approaching birth of her first child slowly turns into a sense of real fear

There are some nasty scares in this chiller from Mexican film-maker Michelle Garza Cervera who is making her feature debut: a horror film that doubles as a parable of post-partum depression, something with the creeping anxiety of Polanski’s Repulsion or Rosemary’s Baby.

Valeria (Natalia Solián) is a young woman who is longing to have a baby with her supportive partner Raúl (Alfonso Dosal) and when Valeria gets pregnant, she couldn’t be happier, or so she thinks. Her sister – married, with children in which Valeria has never taken much interest – is openly contemptuous of her conversion to the motherhood ideal, and her parents are themselves politely sceptical. A chance meaning brings Valeria into contact with an old lover, Octavia (Mayra Batalla), and Valeria is plagued with memories of the exciting,...

The Cannes Film Festival has unveiled the poster for the 76th edition featuring none other than Gallic cinema icon Catherine Deneuve.

The black and white photo pictures the noted performer in the film “La Chamade” (Heartbeat), directed by Alain Cavalier. Shot in 1968 on Pampelonne beach, near Saint-Tropez, the film stars Deneuve as Lucile, who the festival describes as living a “worldly and superficial life, tinged with ease and a taste for luxury. Her heart beats frantically, hurriedly, passionately.”

Cannes official 2023 poster featuring Catherine Deneuve

The festival called her “an embodiment of cinema, far from what is conventional or appropriate. Without compromise and always in tune with her convictions, even if it means going against the grain of the times,” recalling that Deneuve has been the muse of filmmakers including Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda, Luis Buñuel, François Truffaut, Marco Ferreri, Manoel de Oliveira, André Téchiné, Emmanuelle Bercot and Arnaud Desplechin.

In...

This year’s Asian World Film Festival will again showcase the very best of Asian cinema, all in an effort to draw greater recognition to the region’s wealth of filmmakers and talent while strengthening ties between the film industries of Hollywood and the continent.

During the pandemic, the 2020 edition was delayed to spring 2021. The festival will highlight pictures from more than 50 countries across Asia. It is unique in that it predominantly screens works that have been submitted to the Oscars and Golden Globes for international feature film and motion picture — non-English language, respectively.

“We started Awff in 2018, and we’re very proud of what we’ve achieved,” says executive and program director Georges Chamchoum, who co-founded the event with Sadyk Sher Niyaz, the former minister of culture of Kyrgyzstan, and Asel Sherniyazova and Brett Syson. “It’s a real passion for me, and our goal is to put a...

"A Nightmare on Elm Street" was the little movie that could, a film that became a turning point for its writer and director, Wes Craven. Inspired by a series of newspaper articles concerning a group of people complaining of having bad nightmares and then dying of mysterious causes soon afterward, the tale of dream demon Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) menacing a group of teens led by Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) made such an enormous amount of money (as did its first few subsequent sequels) that it made distribution house New Line Cinema into "the house that Freddy built," and began a franchise that remains popular to this day.

Yet "Nightmare" wasn't only successful for its makers; it also added to the culture in numerous ways. It became a watershed moment for the horror film, providing a brand new template for unscrupulous producers and ambitious young stalwarts to follow ever since...

"Nocebo" is an equally psychological and physical horror movie. It's mind and body horror, both surreal and all too realistic. Director Lorcan Finnegan's film takes a horrific part of the world, which is best not to spoil, and turns it into a suitably nightmarish setting featuring stars Eva Green and Chai Fonacier. 

The home is another cage in Finnegan's new film. "Lorcan explored that a bit in "Vivarium,'" Green told us in a recent interview, referencing Finnegan's 2019 sci-fi mystery. "It was something like being the perfect house, but it's too perfect and you choke. There's something when everything is too perfect, it's not right."

Green is an actor who works with true independent spirits. The "Penny Dreadful" star has made some box office hits, like "Casino Royale," but she's also made several out-of-the-box films, such as "Franklyn," "Perfect Sense," and "The Salvation." With "Nocebo," Green stars in another...

Hollywood didn't force Tobe Hooper to make horror movies, but he and other top genre directors may have felt a little trapped in genre jail by the Hollywood brass. Tobe Hooper began his career as more of a surrealist filmmaker with the hallucinatory hippie romance "Eggshells" back in 1969. Hooper shot the film in Austin, Texas where, at that time, the capitol city was becoming a haven for the blossoming counter culture movement, even if local law enforcement and conservative Texans weren't exactly welcoming them with open arms. Hooper's inventiveness and prowess behind the camera was already apparent in "Eggshells," especially in the more psychedelic sequences that used a lot of camera tricks and compositing to make it feel like the viewer was going through the same psychotropic journey as the hippie couple up on screen. 

There were already echoes of Hooper's next film, "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," in the setup for "Eggshells,...

Heida Reed as Rita in Natalie Kennedy’s Blank. Photo: Brainstorm Media For a writer, there are few things more intimidating than the blank page. Creativity at its best comes organically, but books and articles live on deadlines, with a specified amount of copy required by a certain date. It...

Now that’s dedication in marriage: Paul Newman’s first directed feature film is a drama showcase for his spouse Joanne Woodward, one likely to garner critical attention. A small-town teacher deals with boredom, isolation, repression, and dwindling hope; the carefully measured conflicts allow good input from actors Kate Harrington, Estelle Parsons, and James Olson as the lover with the right approach at just the right time. It’s a picture of sensitive emotions: is Rachel Cameron really becoming a spinster? Does she have any choice in the matter? Middle age does tend to sneak up on a person . . .

Rachel, Rachel

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1968 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 101 min. / Available at Wac-Amazon / Street Date September 6, 2022 / 21.99

Starring: Joanne Woodward, James Olson, Kate Harrington, Estelle Parsons, Donald Moffat, Frank Corsaro, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Bernard Barrow, Nell Potts.

Cinematography: Gayne Rescher

Art Director: Robert Gundlach

Film Editor: Dede Allen

Original Music: Jerome Moross...

Tell me if this sounds familiar: a famous actor is cast against type as one of the most iconic blonde women of the 20th century—a woman who’s life ended tragically and would go on to be eulogized by the Elton John song, “A Candle in the Wind.”

Am I describing Andrew Dominik’s forthcoming Blonde which casts Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe or Pablo Larraín’s Spencer, which starred Kristen Stewart as Diana Spencer, the one-time Princess of Wales? The irony is that it could describe both, but the similarities between the two projects are also echoed in how unusual they are; these are glamorous, prestigious movies that on the surface look designed to win awards, but the darkness within suggests something more unsettling about fame and the way it’s used to build up—and then destroy—women. Often blonde.

We of course will have to...

This review of “Men” was first published May 9, 2022, after its premiere at Cannes Film Festival.

The debate over the term “elevated horror” is sure to continue with writer-director Alex Garland’s latest feature, the village grotesque “Men.”

The tale of a young Londoner (Jessie Buckley) whose healing getaway turns harrowing, this calculated exercise in menace wants so very much to subvert, confound, and disturb as it probes mutating fractures between what were once quaintly called “the sexes” that it forgets to function as a movie.

And yet, Garland’s active engagement with his themes, moods, and show-stopping ick is still something to be reckoned with in today’s climate of fear in the film industry regarding original stories. For those thrown by the “Ex Machina” director’s last film, the nervy sci-fi odyssey “Annihilation” — an assured, emotional journey into the impenetrable — “Men” and its clunky-then-gunky head-scratchers aren’t likely to restore faith.

A common setting in many a genre outing over the years is the apartment complex due to its familiarity yet isolation. Living in close proximity to other people yet not knowing what’s going on behind their doors offers limitless potential for thrills and chills, which is best exemplified by outings like Roman Polanski’s so-called ‘Apartment’ trilogy including “Repulsion”, “Rosemary’s Baby”, and “The Tenant” but also spreading outward to titles including “The Sentinel”, “Poltergeist 3”, “Dark Waters” and “Rec”, to name just a few. Now, filmmaker Vikram K. Kumar attempts to provide his own take on the setting with this Tamil-lensed chiller that has quite a lot to like about it.

on Amazon

Moving into a new apartment, Manohar (Madhavan) and his family, mother (Saranya), wife Priya (Neetu Chandra), and children are ecstatic to enjoy life in their spacious new home. Almost immediately, though, they begin...

I often complain that contemporary schlock horror films throw too much at you — the if-this-formula-demon-or-scare-tactic-doesn’t-work-try-this-one approach to keeping an audience goosed. That said, I’m not sure if bare-bones, we’ve-only-got-one-formula-scare-tactic-in-our-bag minimalism is the answer. In “Room 203,” a couple of besties — Kim (Francesca Zuereb), a freshman college journalism student, and Izzy (Viktoria Vinyarska), an aspiring actress and dissolute party girl still traumatized by her mother’s death-by-od — find an apartment together in an eccentric old converted commerce building.

How do we know the place is meant to creep us out? Because they’re in room 203, which looks like a half-finished boutique hotel suite, and when you title a film “Room 203” you’re undoubtedly invoking “The Shining”. Because the landlord, in a newsboy cap and bowtie, is named Ronan (Scott Gremillion) and acts like the sole weird competitor in a best zoomer John Malkovich impersonation contest. And because the...

It’s that time of year again. While some directors annually share their favorite films of the year, Steven Soderbergh lists everything he consumed, media-wise. For 2021––another year in which he not only released a new film, but shot another (and produced the Oscars)––he still got plenty of watching in.

Along with catching up on 2021’s new releases, he took in plenty of classics, including Jaws, Citizen Kane, Metropolis, The French Connection, and Lubitsch’s Ninotchka and Design For Living. Early last year, he also saw a cut of Channing Tatum’s Dog, which doesn’t arrive until next month. He also, of course, screened his latest movies while in post-production, with three viewings of No Sudden Move and three viewings of Kimi, which arrives on February 10 on HBO Max and the first look of which can be seen below.

Check out the list below via his official site.

Stephen Karam’s claustrophobic family drama “The Humans” takes place in what, to a non-New Yorker, might resemble the most terrifying and uninhabitable apartment on the market: The paint’s peeling, light fixtures dangle precariously from the ceiling, and the only natural light seeps in through dirty windows looking out on the most depressing airshaft of all time. It makes Catherine Deneuve’s flat in “Repulsion” look like a luxury condo.

But the two-story, ground-level duplex is actually a pretty cush Lower East Side unit, and for Karam, who wrote and directed the film from his own 2016 play, it’s not so bad. That’s because he more or less lived in this place during his starving-artist days in New York City.

“The reason I was able to afford it as a playwright [with a] day job working as an assistant [was because] I lived in the basement. My roommate lived on the ground floor.

Claustrophic tale of a woman falling apart in her flat is familiar territory, but told here with fresh panache

Documentary-maker Frida Kempff makes her feature debut with a Swedish-set thriller drenched in urban paranoia. Molly (Cecilia Milocco), who has recently finished a stay at a psychiatric hospital following a personal tragedy, has moved into a new flat hoping for a fresh start. The plan proves futile: she is soon plagued by mysterious, relentless sounds of knocking coming from her ceiling. Convinced that someone is being hurt, Molly is determined to trace the origin of this mysterious cry for help, only to be faced with others’ disbelief and her own deteriorating sanity.

Such a premise is by no means novel – apartment angst has been done to death since at least the mid-60s, after Polanski’s Repulsion – yet the eerie visuals and Milocco’s heart-wrenching performance elevate Knocking above its otherwise thin plot.

Writer/director/actor Jim Cummings joins hosts Josh Olson and Joe Dante to discuss a few of his favorite movies.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Thunder Road short film (2016)

Thunder Road (2018)

The Wolf Of Snow Hollow (2020)

The Beta Test (2021)

Jack Reacher (2012)

The ’Burbs (1989) – Ti West’s trailer commentary, Burbs-Mania from Tfh

Big (1988)

War Of The Worlds (2005) – Glenn Erickson’s 4K Blu-ray review

Psycho (1960) – John Landis’s trailer commentary, Randy Fuller’s wine pairings

Children Of Men (2006)

Y Tu Mama Tambien (2002)

Russian Ark (2002) – Brian Trenchard-Smith’s trailer commentary

The Beach (2000)

Titanic (1997)

28 Days Later (2003)

Victoria (2015) – Eduardo Rodriguez’s trailer commentary

Krisha (2015)

Dogtooth (2009)

Inside Out (2015)

Toy Story (1995)

Finding Nemo (2003)

Wall-e (2008)

Up (2009)

Rosemary’s Baby (1968) – Mark Pellington’s trailer commentary, Oren Peli’s trailer commentary

False Positive (2021)

Repulsion (1965) – Michael Lehman’s trailer commentary

Seduced And Abandoned (1964)

Divorce Italian Style (1961)

La Dolce Vita (1960) – Dan Ireland’s trailer commentary

My Beautiful Girl, Mari (2002)

Speed Racer...

Can someone get Edgar Wright a DJ residency? Or a prime-time (or drive-time) radio slot. Few working directors are so passionate and eager to play the tunes, to fill the audio mix of their films with their voluminous record collection. In the immensely entertaining Last Night in Soho, he associates and recalls––especially if you come from or reside in the UK––the Britpop era; that time in the mid-90s where British pop music (not forgetting the Spice Girls along with Oasis and Blur) was commercially triumphant, when it wore its British identity on its sleeve in ways that ranged from prideful to nostalgic to necrophiliac (the latter word as music journalist Scott Plagenhoef described it). Also vital to recall are the overlapping cross-currents of the Euro 96 football tournament (where the “It’s Coming Home” terrace anthem and meme derives from) and Tony Blair’s controversial rebranding of the UK Labour Party.

The reviews for Pablo Larraín’s “Spencer” are here straight from the Venice Film Festival, declaring that even if the melodramatic-bordering-on-campy film isn’t for everyone, Kristen Stewart’s “genius” take on Princess Diana just might be.

In his review for The Wrap, Jason Solomons describes “Spencer” as an “intense, giddy spectacle with Shakespearean or indeed Racinian ambitions,” before making it very clear that, ultimately, “it’s Stewart’s film.”

“She gets the doe-eyed, pitying tilt of the head and the little posh girl voice down pretty well, but this is no impression — it’s more an interpretation of a classic role, bringing layers of real human complexity to a figure who, for all the mythology that surrounds her, still looms large in the British and global conscience,” Solomons wrote.

“This Diana isn’t the likable People’s Princess or Queen of Hearts whom the public adored. We get none of that.

Shortly before the People’s Princess drives solo into this latest telling of her tale behind the wheel of a top-down convertible, an opening epitaph promises us, “A fable based on a true tragedy.” But then, given the tight narrative focus of Pablo Larraín’s “Spencer,” which takes place in 1991 over the course of three excruciating yuletide days at the royal estate of Sandringham, one might ask: To what tragedy does that opening inscription refer?

Is the onetime Diana Spencer a tragic figure because of her life — her unhappy marriage, her impossible expectations, her– listen, there are two seasons of “The Crown” about this, you already know the story — or because of her death, which arrived five and half years outside the scope of the film? This film would say both.

With “Spencer,” director Larraín and screenwriter Steven Knight have devised that works from the (almost certainly correct) assumption that...

Stars: Cecilia Milocco, Albin Grenholm, Ville Virtanen, Krister Kern, Alexander Salzberger, Charlotta Åkerblom | Written by Emma Broström | Directed by Frida Kempff

Obviously inspired by not only societies way of treating the mentally ill but also the freakish, terrifying works of Roman Polanski (Repulsion) and Alfred Hitchcock (Rear Window), Knocking is a slow-burn horror that has the audience questioning what’s happening as much as the films heroine Molly (Cecilia Milocco).

The film tells the story of the aforementioned Molly who has just moved into her new apartment in a large apartment block. However her stay is unnerved by a haunting knocking sound from upstairs. As the noises become more desperate and increasingly sound like cries for help, she confronts her neighbours, but it seems no one else can hear them. In an unsettling quest for truth, Molly soon realises that no one believes her, and begins to question if she...

Most pictures are worth a thousand words. The shot of Lydia Lunch that graces the poster of her documentary, Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over, is worth a thousand and one atom bombs. It’s a famous Annie Sprinkle snapshot of her from 1986. The singer/provocateur/punk rock O.G. is facing slightly away from the camera. She’s sporting red hair and even redder lipstick, clad in a similarly colored brassiere and spandex skirt — everything falls somewhere on spectrum between firetruck and candy-apple. Her head is tilted back,...

Hopkins gives a moving, Oscar-winning turn as a man with dementia in a film full of intelligent performances, disorienting time slips and powerful theatrical effects

“Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!” says King Lear, a plea which is overwhelmingly sad because it can never be heard by anyone with the power to grant it. Anthony Hopkins, who played Lear in Richard Eyre’s production for the BBC, now delivers another performance as an ailing patriarch with a favourite daughter and nowhere to stay, in a film directed by Florian Zeller, and adapted by Christopher Hampton from Zeller’s own award-winning stage play. There is unbearable heartbreak in this movie, for which Hopkins has become history’s oldest best actor Oscar-winner, and also genuine fear, like something you might experience watching Roman Polanski’s Repulsion or M Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense.

Related: Florian Zeller on The Father...

The new trailer for Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho begins with Thomasin McKenzie staring at a marquee billboard for Sean Connery’s fifth James Bond movie, Thunderball. For both her and audiences, it immediately lets us know we’ve been transported into a distant—and often romanticized—past. Yet instead of Bond, the actual tone of auteur Wright’s new film evokes an entirely different style: one as trippy as the fractured image of Anya Taylor-Joy staring back at McKenzie in the mirror.

Last Night in Soho has been the long anticipated and mysterious thriller Wright and Focus Features have been teasing out for years (it was originally intended for release in September 2020 before the pandemic). We’ve only known that the filmmaker considered it his first real horror film after lightly dabbling in the genre in the otherwise satirical zombie comedy, Shaun of the Dead (2004).

But now...

"Things will be great when you're... downtown!" Focus Features has debuted the first official trailer for Edgar Wright's vibrant new London thriller titled Last Night in Soho, currently scheduled to open this October. This psychological horror is inspired by other British horror films, like Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now and Polanski's Repulsion. A young girl, passionate about fashion design, is mysteriously able to enter the 1960s where she encounters her idol, a dazzling wannabe singer. But 1960s London is not what it seems, and time seems to fall apart with shady consequences. The exquisite cast stars Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy, along with Matt Smith, Diana Rigg, Rita Tushingham, Terrence Stamp, and Jessie Mei Li. This looks ravishing! I love the style and colors and all the terrifying mystery. Everything about this is amazing so far, and that cracking shot turning into the logo is perfect. Do you believe in ghosts?...

Writer, director and actress Rebecca Miller discusses a few of her favorite films with hosts Josh Olson and Joe Dante.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Personal Velocity: Three Portraits (2002)

The Ballad Of Jack And Rose (2005)

The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee (2009)

Maggie’s Plan (2015)

Explorers (1985)

The Way We Were (1973)

Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953)

Annie Hall (1977)

Repulsion (1965)

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Knife In The Water (1962)

The Tenant (1976)

Cries and Whispers (1972)

Persona (1966)

The Magician (1958)

Hour Of The Wolf (1968)

The Virgin Spring (1960)

The Seventh Seal (1957)

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

The Exorcist (1973)

The Shining (1980)

La Dolce Vita (1960)

Regarding Henry (1991)

Angela (1995)

Badlands (1973)

Casino (1995)

On The Waterfront (1954)

My Dinner with Andre (1981)

Jules and Jim (1962)

The Bitter Tears Of Petra von Kant (1972)

Wings Of Desire (1987)

The Killer Inside Me (1976)

The Killer Inside Me (2010)

Married To The Mob (1988)

Blue Velvet (1986)

Dune (1984)

Imitation Of Life (1934)

Imitation Of Life (1959)

Written On The Wind (1956)

Magnificent Obsession (1954)

All That Heaven Allows...

Writer, director, producer, editor, cinematographer, and actor Larry Fessenden chats with hosts Joe Dante & Josh Olson about some of his favorite movies.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Habit (1995)

Jakob’s Wife (2021)

Phantom Thread (2017)

The Last Winter (2006)

Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957)

The Crawling Eye (1958)

The Reptile (1966)

Peeping Tom (1960)

Casablanca (1942)

Jaws (1975)

Man Of A Thousand Faces (1957)

Scarlet Street (1945)

Suspicion (1941)

Rope (1948)

The Lady Vanishes (1938)

Night Of The Living Dead (1968)

Frankenstein (1931)

The Wolf Man (1941)

Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

Dracula (1931)

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

Taxi Driver (1976)

Mean Streets (1973)

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

Playtime (1973)

The Thing (1982)

The Howling (1981)

An American Werewolf In London (1981)

An American Werewolf In Paris (1997)

I Was A Teenage Werewolf (1957)

Ginger Snaps (2001)

The Terminator (1984)

The Wolfman (2010)

Van Helsing (2004)

The Mummy (2017)

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994)

The Invisible Man (1933)

The Invisible Man (2020)

Amazon Women On The Moon (1987)

Wendigo (2001)

Fargo (1996)

Raising Arizona (1987)

Seven (1995)

Man Bites Dog...

Those who expected more outright terror from a young couple’s sojourn in a middle-of-nowhere farmhouse from hell in “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” may find something to love about Devereux Milburn’s first feature “Honeydew.” Adrift in the twilight zone between the “Hansel and Gretel” fairytale and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” this gross-out, slow-dripping, arthouse horror siphons dread out of deadpan places. “Honeydew” sure , unsure of what it wants to say even when it’s saying whatever that is loudly.

That could be attributed to Milburn’s background as a music video and short film director, because “Honeydew” feels like a germ of an idea distended to feature length. Steven Spielberg’s son Sawyer Spielberg makes his feature acting debut as Sam, one half of a desultory couple opposite Malin Barr as Rylie. She’s a PhD student chasing her thesis in botany, whose study of the decaying farmlands...

Peter Francis has blockbuster stories to spare. He can wax nostalgic about Margarita Fridays on the set of “Titanic,” the practical challenges of three James Bond films, or the precision of the first two “Harry Potter” movies. Francis served as set designer or art director on those and many other projects before stepping up to become a production designer on much smaller movies over the past decade.

No matter the high-profile nature of those earlier gigs, however, Francis beams the most about his most recent credit, “The Father” — an intentionally disorienting chamber drama all set in one location, made on a limited budget, and the latest justification of his decision to gamble on riskier gigs.

“You’re only as good as your last job,” Francis said. “‘The Father’ is the best thing I’ve done, one of those projects that comes along so rarely where everything just clicked from every angle.

Fear No Evil / Ritual of Evil

Blu ray

Kino Lorber

1969, 1970 / 196 Min. / 1:33.1

Starring Louis Jourdan, Wilfred Hyde-White, Bradford Dillman

Cinematography by Andrew J. McIntyre, Lionel Lindon

Directed by Paul Wendkos, Robert Day

Just as she hops into bed with Charles Aznavour in Shoot the Piano Player, Michèle Mercier exclaims, “Television is a cinema that you can see at home.” Et voilà—from Michèle’s lips to Studio City’s ear, Hollywood responded with a new kind of home entertainment, movies made exclusively for TV. The first examples of this awkward hybrid began to appear in the mid-sixties, but it wasn’t the first time the small-screen tried to expand its horizons; CBS beat movie studios to the punch with Playhouse 90‘s original productions of The Miracle Worker in 1957 and Judgment at Nuremberg in 1959. And there was the occasional holiday treat like NBC’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin starring Van Johnson...

In horror films, cheap thrills are just as good as expensive ones. You don’t need a huge budget to scare your audience senseless. Take the new British chiller Host, described by Dread Central as “the scariest film of the past decade” – it all takes place on a laptop screen, and features a handful of actors and just a sprinkling of effects, but manages to be incredibly effective and unsettling. Here’s a selection of some of the best low budget horrors that have revolutionised the genre with their cost-cutting approach to fright, using resourcefulness, new technology and canny marketing to work around budgetary restrictions.

Night of the Living Dead (1969)

George A.Romero’s zombie shocker, featuring a group of people under siege from the undead in a farmhouse, cost a little over $100k and made over $18million at the box office. Superbly scripted and beautifully photographed, Romero garnered terrific...

Scottish actor John Fraser has died at the age of 89 after a battle with cancer, his family has said.

Richard E. Grant was among those to pay tribute to The Dam Busters and El Cid actor today, posting on twitter:

My friend John Fraser has died at 89. All of us, lucky enough to know him, have benefitted from his Life enhancing generosity, kindness and gift for finding humour in every situation. pic.twitter.com/DPBjWH6cYB

— Richard E. Grant (@RichardEGrant) November 11, 2020

Mark Gatiss also posted a tribute:

A very fine actor, a blistering Bosie, an outrageous memoirist and a beautiful, beautiful man. Rip John Fraser pic.twitter.com/8z4COAAQpY

— Mark Gatiss (@Markgatiss) November 7, 2020

Born in Glasgow in 1931, Fraser broke into film in the early 1950s, playing Flight Lieutenant John Hopgood in the 1955 British classic The Dam Busters, and appearing in the 1957 film adaptation of J. B. Priestley’s The Good Companions,...

The writer/director of Martha Marcy May Marlene and The Nest takes hosts Josh Olson and Joe Dante on an exploration of his favorite cinematic endings.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011)

The Nest (2020)

Citizen Kane (1941)

The Cowboys (1972)

The Parallax View (1974)

Three Days of the Condor (1975)

Limbo (1999)

Nashville (1975)

The Long Goodbye (1973)

3 Women (1977)

Chinatown (1974)

Some Like It Hot (1959)

The Third Man (1949)

Do The Right Thing (1989)

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994)

Our Idiot Brother (2011)

Shoot The Moon (1982)

Parasite (2019)

The Wild Bunch (1969)

The Ice Storm (1997)

Kramer Vs. Kramer (1979)

The Brood (1979)

The Graduate (1967)

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

The Candidate (1972)

The Sixth Sense (1999)

The Birds (1963)

The Firm (1989)

Scum (1979)

The Firm (2009)

The Vanishing (1988)

The Vanishing (1993)

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Repulsion (1965)

Pirates (1986)

What? (1972)

Blowup (1966)

Blow Out (1981)

The Long Good Friday (1980)

Other Notable Items

Jude Law

Carrie Coon

Quentin Tarantino

John Wayne

The Pure Cinema Podcast

The Film Forum

Warren Beatty

Tfh Guru Howard...

Spoilers for Saint Maud to follow

If there hadn’t been a pandemic one of the horror movies everyone would be talking about this year would be Saint Maud. We’d be talking about it in the same breath as Hereditary, The Witch, The Babadook and Raw, but we’d know that it isn’t really like any of them. We might mention Repulsion, The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, but we’d know what we’d seen is new and exciting.

Release in UK cinemas on October 9 after getting pushed back and pulled forward several times, Saint Maud can finally find its way to audiences who feel comfortable going to the pictures – with a digital release to follow.

This is director Rose Glass’ debut film, an incredibly confident first feature which sees Morfydd Clark’s pious palliative care nurse believe she is on a mission from god to save the soul of her dying patient,...

Morfydd Clark is superb as a troubled caregiver in this extraordinarily scary horror melodrama

Last year, Morfydd Clark appeared in Armando Iannucci’s new version of David Copperfield playing both David’s mother and the woman he’s in love with – a Freudian-doppelganger performance so coolly understated that many didn’t realise it was happening, or quite why they found Clark’s appearance(s) so disquieting. Well, there’s nothing understated about her now, and what a sensational breakthrough in this extraordinary horror melodrama from first-time feature director Rose Glass. Clark gives an operatically freaky turn that knifed me in the kidneys, the way Catherine Deneuve did in Repulsion or Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves. And her final split second on screen is the equivalent of brutally pulling out the knife to start the internal bleeding.

It’s a scary movie that is also a satirical nightmare about the...

The horror genre is a fun one in that it can go in many directions, but it is often dominated by men in front of and behind the camera. Hulu’s new anthology series Monsterland, which debuts Friday, subverts that expectation with a female showrunner and a cast and crew dominated by women.

Monsterland creator and showrunner Mary Laws was joined by actress Kelly Marie Tran and director of photography Anka Malatynska and director Desiree Akhavan at the virtual PaleyFest Fall TV Previews event to talk about the new series and how it champions female narratives.

“I think that its safe to say that as forward-moving as Hollywood is, I don’t think there are opportunities for women’s stories on screen, for women in leadership roles and for women protagonist roles,” said Laws. “I think so often I found myself in a room with a lot of men making...

The possessed mom movie is having a moment right now. Between The Babadook, Hereditary and Us, the premise has evolved from a log line – mom must protect her kids from a demon – into its own sub-genre. The latest entry, Relic, is a distinct, visceral experience and a grim reminder that mother and child must eventually grow apart.

Natalie Erika Jame’s ability to notch up that dread – with a creaky floorboard, the movement of a shadow – is all the more impressive given that it takes awhile to warm up to the two heroines. You first meet Kay (Emily Mortimer) and her daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) en route to the Australian woods. There, they hope to spend quality time with Kay’s mother, Edna (Robyn Nevin), who is living alone in a two story cottage. The catch: Edna isn’t there. The house is empty.

Kay and Sam decide to stick around anyways,...

All hail Saint Maud as we prepare to rejoice in her ascension. A24‘s psycho-evangelical thriller will be the first horror movie shown in theaters since Covid-19 Stephen-King-novelized us all. And if that’s not scary enough, it’s being compared to Hereditary and The Witch as the next great modern horror film. The film will open nationwide on July 17.

Saint Maud is a “chilling and boldly original vision of faith, madness, and salvation in a fallen world,” according to its official website. “Maud, a newly devout hospice nurse, becomes obsessed with saving her dying patient’s soul — but sinister forces, and her own sinful past, threaten to put an end to her holy calling.” This is the first feature from writer/director Rose Glass, who brings a vibe similar to the claustrophobic horror classics Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Repulsion (1965).

The film stars Morfydd Clark in the title role, a private...

People having panic attacks talk about the sensation of the walls closing in, a feeling with which this critic is not totally unfamiliar, but lately, it’s been more like they’re alive.

If I time everything correctly, I only have to venture out beyond the confines of my clean apartment and into the viral wilds of New York once per week to replenish supplies of groceries and red wine. That means that in the best-case scenario, the body will remain in what an optimist would generously describe as a “cozy” space for one-hundred-and-sixty-ish hours at a time.

Continue reading ‘Repulsion’ Is A Chilling Tale Of Isolation & A Must-See During Quarantine at The Playlist.