Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy – now released on Blu-Ray by Second Run – is a great film about animals, which is to say it’s a great film about people. Most films about the animal kingdom are sentimental, Disneyfied looks at nature, or at least ones that anthropomorphise their star […]
Movies & Documentaries
She Loved Blossoms More (2024): Headsplittingly Surreal Sci-Fi Family Drama
After making the festival circuit last year, the second feature film from Yannis Veslemes, She Loved Blossoms More, arrives over five years since he contributed to the anthology The Field Guide to Evil. This film shares some of the sensibilities with one of his fellow contributors to that anthology, Peter […]
Time Travel is Dangerous (2024) “My God, it’s full of stars!”
Arriving on digital platforms from 29th September is Time Travel is Dangerous, Chris Reading’s sci-fi comic mockumentary which enjoyed great success at the Austin Film Festival last year and a limited theatrical run here in the UK earlier this year. Written by Reading with producers Anna-Elizabeth Shakespeare and Hillary Shakespeare, […]
The Long Walk (2025) King adaptation shoves you to the ground and keeps on walking
The Long Walk doesn’t ease you in- it shoves you onto the pavement and you hit the ground walking. From its first shot, there’s no buffer, no warm-up, just the relentless rhythm of feet on asphalt and the unshakeable knowledge that this journey has only one possible ending. Adapted from […]
Deathstalker (Fantastic Fest 2025) Retrograde 80’s trash finds glorious new purpose
In an age when to be dorky is to be damned, when eons have passed since the final battle between charm and naffness sealed the fate of many brave artist-warriors yet to be born, a hero will rise. His name… is Steven Kostanski. His conquests are legendary in the latest […]
Marama (Fantastic Fest 2025)
Colonialism is an ill of the “political class”, an eternal manifestation of the 1%’s insatiable greed. Their empire way of thinking has drawn together some far-flung corners, such as North Yorkshire and the Maori people of New Zealand, as facilitated by the violence of Captain James Cook. While Captain Cook may be […]
Dildo Heaven (2002) (Fantastic Fest 2025)
You’d think you would know what kind of film you’re in for when you decided to sit down and watch a movie called Dildo Heaven (2002), but no matter what your expectations might be, you’d only be half right. It’s a hell of a title, to say the least. For […]
Kenichi Ugana Interview: The Curse (Fantastic Fest 2025)
We continue our 2025 coverage of Fantastic Fest with something a little different now… Yesterday, I talked about the latest movie from Japanese indie director, Kenichi Ugana. A bit fan of his previous work, The Gesouidoz, as soon as I saw it was part of this year’s fantastic fest line-up, […]
A Woman Called Mother (Fantastic Fest 2025)
The Indonesian horror scene is currently doing very strong domestic business; it hasn’t had a break-out international film on the level of Japan’s Ringu or South Korea’s A Tale of Two Sisters yet, but you wouldn’t bet against it happening. Randolph Zaini’s A Woman Called Mother probably won’t be that […]
Meat Kills (Fantastic Fest 2025)
Upon brief inspection, mainly the title and synopsis, Meat Kills would appear to be a horror-thriller about the grotesque way that animals are treated for human consumption. A group of activists stage a rescue mission to release pigs suffering under atrocious conditions in a pig farm, and come face to […]