The prolific Jirô Nagae makes his UK debut at Glasgow’s FrightFest with his 38th film, The Convenience Store, hitting productivity numbers that rival peak-era Takashi Miike. Working almost exclusively within horror, it was inevitable that his work would eventually reach the UK’s hungry genre audience. Japanese konbini (the Japanese term […]
Pop Culture
The Restoration at Grayson Manor (Glasgow Frightfest 2026)
Eighteen years after he brought body-snatcher horror back from the grave with his cult anthology favourite I Sell the Dead (2008), and fourteen years since he updated the summer-camp slasher for the found-footage era with his segment in the original V/H/S (2012), Irish filmmaker Glenn McQuaid has returned to reinvigorate […]
Red Riding (Glasgow Frightfest 2026)
The opening of Red Riding, and indeed the first act, may raise certain expectations in the viewer. The title, as well as an anecdote from a character, suggests that you are in for a particular type of film with various visual cues supporting this expectation, including artwork, a scientific explanation […]
Karmadonna (Glasgow Frightfest 2026)
Biases and expectations are inherently and exceedingly dumb, as they often prove to be, but they remain – no matter how much you’d like to beg to differ. A case in point from Glasgow’s iteration of FrightFest is Karmadonna, a Serbian thriller/horror directed by Aleksandar Radivojević. As a fan of […]
Bone Keeper (Glasgow Frightfest 2026)
For as long as humanity has walked the Earth, we have both feared and felt the allure of holes in the ground; the first humans lived in caves, and perhaps that is the reason why many crave the opportunity to return to the dark, confined openings in the earth that […]
Outside the Blue Box: Doran’s Box (Play for Today, 1976)
When Channel 5 brought back the legendary anthology drama strand Play for Today in 2025, the anticipation was tempered by a fear that it couldn’t live up to the original run’s standards. “Standards”, though, meant different things for different people. Some were concerned a modern Play for Today couldn’t match […]
Jailbroken (Glasgow Frightfest 2026) World Premiere
Opening this year’s Glasgow FrightFest is the World Premiere of Vasily Chuprina’s directorial debut, Jailbroken, and while the opening movie of any festival is a statement of intent, here that statement is unusual. Instead of horror, we get a one-room thriller in the mould of Steven Knight’s Locke or Joel Schumacher’s Phone Booth as […]
TEN WILL (Slamdance Film Festival 2026)
When is someone’s sentence truly over? The punishment often matches the crime, but what happens when the crime is so distasteful that any judicial ruling pales in comparison to what the world has in store when the accused is released? It’s a weighty, thorny topic, and nigh-on impossible to reckon […]
Matapanki (Slamdance 2026) North American Premiere
In its setup, director Diego “Mapache” Fuentes’s Matapanki struck me as a Chilean version of Josh Trank’s Chronicle: a young man acquires superhero-like powers and soon becomes unable to control his newfound abilities. What Matapanki adds to this story, however, is a really nifty concoction of political satire matched with […]
Tony Odyssey (Slamdance 2026) World Premiere (REVIEW)
Brazilian cinema is having one of its occasional moments on the world stage, thanks to films like The Secret Agent and I’m Still Here breaking the usual containment unit of Best International Feature and being nominated in major categories at American awards shows. Even a synopsis of those films will […]