Red Rooms

Digging up turpitude from the deep recesses of dark web opportunism, Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms is a serial killer thriller that finds power in its restraint and shocking prescience: an evil — yet vital — film to understand the stranglehold of postmodern, screen-abetted detachment. Juliette Gariépy’s chilling performance is a roundhouse kick to the teeth to dismantle our culture of macabre obsession, parasocial madness, and growing numbness.

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NYFF 2025 Film Review: Festival Dispatch
NYFF 2025 Film Review: Festival Dispatch

Welcome to my dispatch from this year’s New York Film Festival. Like always, I won’t be writing full reviews of everything I see at the festival, but this year has plenty of notable features worth at least a quick write-up: Mary Bronstein’s blistering Rose Bryne Showcase, Park Chan-wook’s return to bloody comedy of errors, and Kelly Reichardt’s subdued anti-heist film. Here are the capsule reviews for No Other Choice, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and The Mastermind.

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NYFF 2025 Film Review: Resurrection
NYFF 2025 Film Review: Resurrection

Better to be a corpse and dream than to live forever and not. And movies are how we dream. Bi Gan’s behemoth is an ode to the artform and a lamentation of our times, carving a path through image-making history.Resurrection is a fever-dream time capsule of the last century of cinema, a hundred-year fugue state disguised as a five-part anthology of dreamers and desire. Somewhere between somnolent and peculiar, it's confirmation that the Chinese filmmaker is one of the strangest, most vital visionaries working today. Minor spoilers ahead…

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NYFF 2025 Film Review: Magellan
NYFF 2025 Film Review: Magellan

Lav Diaz's reputation for inaccessibility has always been a matter of runtime, not comprehension — his films are classical narratives told at a geological pace, patient rather than opaque. It's fitting, then, that Magellan, at a comparatively brisk two and a half hours, is simultaneously his most "accessible" work and his least conventional: less a story than a series of tableaus, an art installation masquerading as a costume epic. Gael García Bernal anchors a docu-drama about the birth of an empire, and the result is one of the year's most quietly devastating history lessons. Minor spoilers ahead…

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SXSW 2025 Film Review: Fucktoys
SXSW 2025 Film Review: Fucktoys

A 16mm stunner through a Tarot-inspired, heightened-reality Louisiana, Annapurna Sriram’s Fucktoys is a luscious, filthy homage to lost artforms and the best film out of SXSW this year: a modern day “trashterpiece.” Minor spoilers ahead…

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SXSW 2025 Film Review: Festival Dispatch
SXSW 2025 Film Review: Festival Dispatch

Welcome to my dispatch from this year’s SXSW. Like always, I won’t be writing full reviews of everything I see at the festival, but this year has plenty of notable features worth at least a quick write-up: Paul Feig’s long-awaited sequel Another Simple Favor, Michael Bay’s kinetic foray into documentaries, and Alison Brie and Dave Franco’s gross-out “metaphorror” flick. Here are the capsule reviews for A Simple Favor 2, We Are Storror, Together, and Death of a Unicorn.

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Actress Maggie Cheung, 1990
Keanu Reeves and Hugo Weaving filming The Matrix (1999) with its revolutionary Bullet Time technology, an effect achieved photographically by a set of still cameras fired sequentially surrounding the subject
Angelina Jolie as Thena in Marvel’s Eternals (2021), directed by Chloé Zhao. What did everyone think of the movie? .............................. Eternals (2021), directed by Chloé Zhao. #Cinematographer: Ben Davis
It Follows (2014), one of the best horror films of the last decade, is now streaming on Netflix. What are your thoughts on David Robert Mitchell’s horror debut? .............................. It Follows (2014), directed by David Robert Mitche
Dune (2021), directed by Denis Villeneuve. #Cinematographer: Greig Fraser
Edgar Wright’s decades-long tour of genres makes a no-frills horror pitstop in Last Night in Soho. A collision between past and present painted with the brush of giallo and other era-appropriate terrors, the film is a lush and arresting thrille
“Mmm…corn syrup. Same stuff they used for pig’s blood in Carrie.” .............................. Scream (1996), directed by Wes Craven. #Cinematographer: Mark Irwin
Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe on the set of Blonde (2022)
Sleepy Hollow (1999), directed by Tim Burton. #Cinematographer: Emmanuel Lubezki
“How do you do, fellow kids?” Steve Buscemi dressed up as his own meme for Halloween. 📷 Debra Wexler
Florence Pugh on the set of Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019)
Titane (2021), directed by Julia Ducournau. #Cinematographer: Ruben Impens
Matt Smith and Anya Taylor-Joy on the set of Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho (2021)
Lightyear (2022), directed by Angus MacClane. Production Designer: Tim Evatt
Léon: The Professional (1994), directed by Luc Besson. #Cinematographer: Thierry Arbogast
Congratulations to the cast and crew of Dune on the official announcement of Part Two! Dune: Part Two is coming October 20, 2023.
The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021), directed by Joel Coen. #Cinematographer: Bruno Delbonnel
“I thought I just needed a good night’s sleep but it’s more than that.” .............................. Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. #Cinematographer: Bruno Delbonnel
The stunning costumes of Dune (2021), designed by Jacqueline West and Bob Morgan. Intricate, sumptuous work bringing the people of Arrakis, House Atreides, and House Harkonnen to life onscreen. Read my full review of the new Denis Villeneuve epic via
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), directed by Tobe Hooper. #Cinematographer: Daniel Pearl