The film’s supernatural flourishes take a backseat to a conflict of a much more mortal variety.
Travis Stevens’s film is psychologically astute, until it gives itself over to turning subtext into extremely legible text.
Larry Fessenden diagnoses the rot of our era through the shifting personalities and power dynamics of solipsistic men.
In the film, what starts as a subtle undercurrent of knowing humor curdles into overt self-referentiality.
This man of many hats riffed on male anxiety, the lasting appeal of the horror genre, and more.
Like Me is an unconventional fusion of horror film, road movie, and sadomasochistic sex drama.
Many genre movies in which bad things happen to women end with them fighting back, but here they just take the money and run.
The Transfiguration is at its strongest when navigating the story’s uneasy relationship to its genre.
What distinguishes Stray Bullets from so many other low-budget crime films is Jack Fessenden’s sense of quietness.
The film conveys a sense of pastiche unpredictably giving way to a raw and primordially intimate emotional realm.
The film covers The Texas Chainsaw Massacre by way of Rob Zombie, Quentin Tarantino, and Ti West.
Ti West’s methodical austerity yields in this film the most powerful passages of his career.
Its aesthetic is striking, but feels intangibly derivative, most obviously suggesting an austere cover of Repulsion.
The film is a wry, appealingly raggedy look at the impossibility of conjuring up excitement from boredom.
Southbound is yet another contemporary horror film that belongs to seemingly every era but its own.
The filmmakers exhibit no interest in watching the story’s central wolves wiggle out of the trap they’ve potentially set for themselves.
Just in time for Halloween: a beautiful transfer of an underrated, confidently directed haunted-house thriller.
It ends up taking the furious and bitter perspective that powers the narrative’s ponderous dramatic core for granted.
Irony is a popular pose struck throughout these shorts.
The film is unavoidably slight, but there’s a certain pleasure in watching talented people wax passionate about a common source of inspiration.