After last year's bumpy edition of Fantastic Fest, roiled by revelations that its founder had continued working with employees and associates who'd been credibly accused of sexual assault, this year's raucous genre celebration felt almost normal — well, "normal" for an event that includes a...

(Screened at Fantastic Fest; now streaming on Netflix) Continuing the Wind River cycle of movies about outsiders going to cold, sad Indian reservations to investigate tragedies, here's Hold the Dark, another brutally chilling drama from Green Room director Jeremy Saulnier. Adapted by...

David Lowery's last movie, A Ghost Story, was about a ghost but wasn't a horror film. His new one, The Old Man & the Gun, is about a career bank robber but isn't a heist thriller. Lowery keeps you on your toes if you're a judge-a-movie-by-its-title kind of person, and he upends expectations...

(Screened at Fantastic Fest; U.S. release TBA) We have Velvet Underground to thank for the title Strike, Dear Mistress, and Cure His Heart, but the movie of that name is from one Mickey Reece, an independent Oklahoma auteur who has made two dozen movies in the last 10 years that have been seen...

(Screened at Fantastic Fest; U.S. release TBA; opens in France in January) Coming-of-age metaphors collide messily in Savage (Les Fauves), a weak-willed French drama by Vincent Mariette in which teenage Laura (Lily-Rose Depp), spending the summer with cousins at a campground, is intrigued by...

(On VOD.) Keep an Eye Out is the latest absurdist lark from Quentin Dupieux, whose Rubber -- about a series of murders committed by a sentient automobile tire -- is one of my favorite absurdist larks of the current century. Called Au Poste! in its native France, Keep an Eye Out takes place...

(Screened at Fantastic Fest; U.S. release TBA) You can tell pretty quickly that something is up with One Cut of the Dead. It starts in an old warehouse serving as the set of an amateurish, low-budget zombie movie, where the director, Higurashi (Takayuki Hamatsu), is having trouble getting...

I skipped out on the big political event of the Toronto International Film Festival, the premiere of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9, a screening at which the director brought out Flint residents and Parkland survivors to drive home the immediacy of the documentary. Moore’s films are designed...

“Addiction is our new default,” quips Juliette Binoche’s Selena in Non-Fiction, a special presentation at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. She’s talking about the rise of binge-watching culture changing viewing patterns, but she might as well be referring to a good chunk...

If you're like me, you 1) assumed the Fantasia International Film Festival just showed Disney's Fantasia on a loop for a few days; and 2) are a moron, because how would that even work? It turns out Fantasia is a "genre" festival -- horror, sci-fi, martial arts, weird comedies, anime, gross stuff,...

(Screened at the 2018 Fantasia Festival; Oscilloscope will release it but hasn't announced when.) One thing you can say for sure about Relaxer: There will never be a gender-swapped remake of it. The story, first juvenile and then surreal, only makes sense in the context of men's craving for...

(Screened at the 2018 Fantasia Festival; distribution plans not yet announced.) Owing to the slippery definition of the word and our robust (for the time being) First Amendment, it takes a lot to get arrested for "obscenity" in America, let alone actually convicted. A few performers and...

(Screened at the 2018 Fantasia Festival; opens July 20 in U.S. theaters) Unfriended: Dark Web has no connection to 2015's Unfriended except that they adhere to the same format: Both unfold in real time entirely on someone's computer screen via their Skype sessions, Facebook chats, and so...

(Screened at the 2018 Fantasia Festival; now playing in U.S. theaters and VOD) The Night Eats the World ("La nuit a dévoré le monde") has a different mood from most zombie films, which proves to be refreshing. It's less mayhem-oriented, quieter, more drama than horror (though not without its...

“She really is so hard on herself,” remarks a relative of the titular character in Kent Jones’ Diane. A gaggle of cousins have come to Diane’s rescue after a drink to unwind for self-care spirals into raging drunkenness. Diane can easily attend to the needs of others, but when it comes to...