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...

This time last year, Hereditary was already being heralded as the best horror film of 2018 following screenings at Sundance and SXSW. And just one year prior, Get Out was praised as one of the best horror films of all time following its premiere at Sundance. Both festivals often yield some of the...

Our ongoing and long-overdue reckoning with sexual abuse and harassment has inspired a new wave of cinema; not only are we seeing more empowering and diverse representations of women and minority groups, but we’re seeing stories that reckon with the root cause of so much of this abuse: toxic...

Over the past few years coming-of-age films have thankfully moved away from typical male-centric stories about teen boys getting drunk and trying to hook up with girls. The genre has come a long way from American Pie and Porky’s, the casual misogyny of the former and the blatant sexism of the...

The plucky, rough-around-the-edges Canadian thriller Level 16 is a Black Mirror-lite story about teenage girls being trained in a creepy, militaristic sort of finishing school called the Vestalis Academy and located in a secret fortified bunker. The girls, about a dozen of them, spend every waking...

In the loudly menacing The Hole in the Ground, a solid debut from Irish director Lee Cronin, young mother Sarah (Seána Kerslake) and her son, Chris (James Quinn Markey), have just moved to an isolated house in the country -- which, not to blame the victims here, never turns out well. Their house...