(Screened at Fantastic Fest; theatrical release TBA.) One simply cannot deny that the former Harry Potter, aka Mr. Daniel Radcliffe, has done a fine job of choosing unique, offbeat, and even downright weird scripts in recent years. Between Horns, Kill Your Darlings, and Swiss Army Man, it's...

Given the current sociopolitical climate and general state of the world, satire seems like a tall order. How can you comically exaggerate people and situations when everything that happens already feels like it’s already been exaggerated for comedic effect? But for that very reason, satire can...

Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead have been floating around the edges of indie sci-fi/horror for the last few years, writing and directing thoughtful under-the-radar films like Spring (2015) and The Endless (2018) that were acclaimed in certain circles but didn't get much mainstream attention. The...

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 convincing performances from his not-very-good actors....

The 2019 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) felt unusually heavy with films concerning religion and its followers. Of the more than 30 films I screened, nearly a third grappled with what it means to be a person of faith or live in a world where religious institutions structure daily life....

I have a complicated relationship with the Telluride Film Festival. It's a world-class fest, usually playing some of the year's best movies, many of them world premieres introduced in person by their directors and stars, who are always humble and gracious. The venues, despite being commandeered...

“A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens,” wrote Dostoyevsky, “but by how it treats its criminals.” Genre cinema from across the globe often provides such insight through penalizing transgression rather than illuminating virtue. Across a number of titles at...

For someone as obsessively Type A as me, the lead-up to a film festival as compact and curated as Fantasia can prove quite nerve-wracking. As an event that unfolds primarily in two screening rooms conveniently located across the street from each other, the choices of films to see are limited to...

Is there such a thing as too much genre cinema? If so, then it would likely occur at Montreal’s Fantasia Festival, an over-three week long celebration of the bonkers and brilliant excesses taking place at the exciting edges of filmmaking. The fest’s 23rd edition begins July 11 with a slate of...

As is increasingly the case in modern cinema, groups underrepresented onscreen are having their stories told more frequently and more honestly than before. Women in particular were very well represented both in front of and behind the camera at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. As a result,...

The Ringer declared last summer that the moment of horror is now here: "Millennial" is no longer a synonym for “young person.” The new cohort, dubbed “Gen Z” or “iGen” depending on who you ask, continues to rise after 2018's generation-defining cry for action that culminated in the...

Dependency can be horrifying. The feeling that your life would suffer irreparable damage if someone or something were removed from it creates a dread all its own. That particular terror permeates a handful of films at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival — not necessarily all “horror films”...

In 2012, the first Avengers movie served as the closing night film for the Tribeca Film Festival. This year, the latest installment served as the festival’s main competition. It was hard to deny the pervasiveness of Marvel’s latest behemoth as it Hulk-smashed through box office records; one...

(On HBO.) Little had to be changed about the plot of Richard Wright's 1940 novel Native Son to make it work with an adaptation set in the present, but something must have been lost in translation. As directed by first-timer Rashid Johnson (a respected Chicago artist) from a screenplay by...

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 competition and willingness to spend absurd amounts of time and energy on total nonsense. That's not to...