The street drug du jour in VFW’s near-if-not-adjacent future is Hype. The hows, the whys, and the highs don’t much matter — it looks like blow and makes you a homicidal maniac for another hit. So should a spurned sidekick to the Hype kingpin steal his remaining supply and take refuge in a...

The story of Bombshell was always going to be difficult to master tonally. It’s a movie about the female employees of Fox News who accused founder Roger Ailes of sexual assault, and whose accusations eventually caused his professional downfall. If that sounds like prickly territory to navigate,...

Back in 2001, fading action star Steven Seagal starred with rapper DMX in Exit Wounds, one of the last Seagal movies to get a wide theatrical release. Seagal has spent the years since then churning out a huge number of low-budget direct-to-video action movies, in which his participation is...

If Sequestrada were a documentary, it might be a success. Onscreen titles explain the plight of Brazil’s indigenous tribes, who have been displaced by the construction of river dams since at least 1989. Writers/directors Sabrina McCormick and Soopum Sohn give a few statistics regarding these...

Peter Strickland has always been a filmmaker on his own wavelength, making uniquely crafted movies like Berberian Sound Studio and The Duke of Burgundy for audiences that are practically a dictionary definition of the term “niche.” It’s hard to get any more niche than his latest, In Fabric,...

When I heard that Feast of the Epiphany, the inaugural feature film from the publication Reverse Shot, melded documentary and fiction, I assumed it would resemble the more formally audacious hybrids of filmmakers like Robert Greene (Kate Plays Christine, Bisbee ’17). No such porous boundary...

Are we ever truly able to escape the past? The mistakes that we’ve made, opinions we’ve held, and lines that we’ve crossed may feel like ancient history, but they’re always there. Hidden under a thin layer of dust, waiting for someone to swipe their hand across and reveal the ugliness of...

One of my favorite flavors of indie horror is the mixtape, lovingly dubbed by filmmakers from an oddball greatest hits of genre inspiration. To Your Last Death is equal parts Heavy Metal, Cabin in the Woods, Saw, and The Belko Experiment. Not every riff plays perfectly into the next, but TYLD...

On their website, you can buy a hat for $35, a grooming set for $42, candles for $48, T-shirts, hoodies, socks, and even beach towels ($45). The majority of items have the words “SOLD OUT” next to them. It’s not a fashion brand, or a beauty publication, or even a simple clothing line. This...

It’s a common enough sight in Christmas films: holiday shoppers admiring animatronic window displays and taking advantage of the sales at department stores while appropriate music plays over the loudspeakers. In 1984’s hard-to-find Comfort and Joy, which opens with a rendition of “God Rest...

Coming on the heels of last year's documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor?, the unabashedly adoring Mister Rogers story A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood puts us at risk of deifying the Presbyterian-minister-turned-TV-host. Frankly, I can't think of anyone in American culture more deserving of the...

Rian Johnson’s Knives Out is both a loving tribute to the murder mystery genre and a scathing satire of white privilege and the bootstrapping myth in the age of Trump. It's one of this year’s most entertaining examples of art as a reflection of the time and culture that produced it. Its Agatha...

Disney’s Frozen has remained an impressive cultural phenomenon since it hit theaters in 2013. We’ve now had six years of little girls dressing like Anna and (mostly) Elsa, and carrying around stuffed versions of Olaf the snowman and Sven the reindeer. Usually there’s some lag time between...

What wild and unnatural spirits exist in the depths of the forest, possessing an ancient and eternal power far beyond our reckoning? There’s an otherworldly quality to the woods, especially when they’re unfamiliar to you. When you’ve grown up in a certain area and have memorized the face of...

Society tends not to bat an eyelid at intergenerational relationships so long as the elder member of the pairing is a man. Even as unease mounts over a mating pattern-turned-cliché, people seem more comfortable when the power dynamic aligns with the gender dynamic. It’s tough to say that older...