A title card at the beginning of writer-director Wes Miller’s Western Hell on the Border laments the erasure of the black cowboy from popular depictions of the Old West, but this poorly written, threadbare production is not exactly the best way to bring forgotten historical figures back to prominence. Miller shines a spotlight on Bass […]

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 sleepy VFW […]

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, that’s because there are lots of conflicting sentiments […]

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 increasingly marginal. DMX, meanwhile, was just […]

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 dams’ negative effect on not just the tribes but also […]

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, perhaps the cultiest of the British director’s […]

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 exists, however. The film resembles something akin to a centaur […]

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 the worst things we’ve […]

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 eventually finds a weirdo […]