Anyone who has a dysfunctional or complicated relationship with their family will doubtless be affected by Steve Blackwood’s short film “Family Game Night.” Blackwood, who previously examined complicated father/son relationships in “Peabrain” (2023), carries the same thematics here. Except this time a bond seems to exist between father and son (albeit strained), while the rif...

I stumbled across a series of found footage analogue horror shorts called “The Backrooms” and was instantly invested. There are dozens of these films scattered across YouTube, the genesis of which was conjured by a young filmmaker and visual effects artist named Kane Parsons. Parsons (who goes by Kane Pixels) began his filmmaking career as [...]

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There’s something faintly absurd about how “Mother Mary” begins, or at least how it settles into itself. A global pop icon, mid-crisis, shows up unannounced at the estate of a fashion designer she hasn’t spoken to in years and says, almost sheepishly: I need a dress. It sounds like the setup to a joke. It [...]

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There’s a great deal of nous in crafting a consistently effective horror-comedy, and “They Will Kill You” gets the job done in piecemeal fashion. It’s imperfect, but zany and hectic enough to sustain mild interest. The Kirill Sokolov helmed picture actually starts rather darkly, truth be told. Tonally, the opening sequence is decidedly grim and dramatic [...]

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New Yorker film critic Richard Brody wrote that there “are two ideal durations for a feature film: sixty-three minutes … and three hours.” In the former case, enough time—per Brody—is granted for “set up and wrap up,” and that theory might resonate in an era of incredibly shrinking attention spans. (Then again, the ceiling wasn’t [...]

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