Maggie Boccella

It sits in your chest like a cough you can’t get rid of, and there’s promise in its bones of what might come next for the Aussie directorial duo.

There are gaps filled with nothing but silence; still, for a no-budget indie, it’s still constructed rather competently.

A fun and frantic vampire film with darkly comic performances amidst its clever life lessons.

If the filmmakers behind The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee can’t even bother to properly honor that legacy by putting in the kind of effort he did, then you’re better off just picking up one of his many Hammer films instead.

The film does so little work to make me care about the girl that came before Rosemary that I simply found myself wondering how she was going to die to properly set up the events of the original.

Blackout is a werewolf movie with plenty of passion behind it that still doesn't pack the punch it needs to.

The film plays with a lot of subgenres — locked door mystery, slasher film, haunted house, alongside the obvious vampire story — that it almost seems like Radio Silence couldn’t decide what their favorite was and opted for a taster menu of everything. That works in its favor occasionally, especially since its monstrous little ballerina, surprisingly, takes up so little of its screen time.

While it never fully succeeds, Khan understands that strange in-between place that ‘80s films exist in and mimics that energy well, even if the script doesn’t quite keep up.

It’s a long, hard ninety minutes, even with someone as charming as Farrier leading the charge, but that ultimately feels like the point — that minutes turn to hours with Michael Organ.

It’s a shame that such a solid set of performances are brought down by an underlying thread of jingoism, one that’s hard to put too fine a point on until the film’s final scene. The final shot of the film is a punch to the throat, a distinct flourish on Friedkin’s part that I absolutely adored, but its origins leave me feeling more than slightly queasy.

Director McKay seems to understand that special balance between terror and camp, and it’s that which makes Renfield, which premiered this week at the Overlook Film Festival, such a delight to watch.

At Midnight is a rom-com that loves the hell out of rom-coms, and rightly so — the genre’s at its best when it’s not trying to be clever or smart or better than those that came before it, when it fully embraces the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes with watching two people fall in love, and Feingold’s script knows it.

The Starling Girl is steeped with empathy, not just for Jem, but for every young woman, religious or not, who struggles to know herself and gives in to the desire to be seen, no matter the voyeur — just to feel alive, and like they matter.

It strikes at the core of what makes us human, our hopes and fears and the relationships we invest ourselves in. It is community as art as activism in one giant loop, filtered through the gaze of a woman so unflinchingly tireless in her efforts that you cannot help but be on her side.