#‘The Thing With Feathers’ Review: A Go-for-Broke Benedict Cumberbatch Unravels in a Movie Stuck Awkwardly Between Horror and Psychodrama

#‘The Thing With Feathers’ Review: A Go-for-Broke Benedict Cumberbatch Unravels in a Movie Stuck Awkwardly Between Horror and Psychodrama

While many films have conjured terrifying physical manifestations of grief, one that set a notably high bar for hand-crafted horror exploring that fecund strand was Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook. The specter of that brutally effective 2014 shocker proves inescapable for writer-director Dylan Southern in The Thing With Feathers, right down to a malevolent figure haunting…

Read More
#‘Folktales’ Review: ‘Jesus Camp’ Directors Head to Norway for a Frigid, Furry and Very Sweet Coming-of-Age Doc

#‘Folktales’ Review: ‘Jesus Camp’ Directors Head to Norway for a Frigid, Furry and Very Sweet Coming-of-Age Doc

A warm and big-hearted crowdpleaser set against a cold and seemingly inhospitable backdrop, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady‘s Folktales can look to Sundance precedent to safely expect to find a welcoming audience. Their new documentary is Boys State (or Girls State) with Norwegian dogsledding instead of American civics. Folktales The Bottom Line Who’s a good…

Read More
#James Mangold Delivers Call to Action for Filmmakers to “Battle Sleepwalking of Our Culture”

#James Mangold Delivers Call to Action for Filmmakers to “Battle Sleepwalking of Our Culture”

James Mangold, fresh from seeing his Bob Dylan offering A Complete Unknown snag eight Oscar nominations, received a hero’s welcome this weekend upon returning to the Sundance Film Festival where he got his start as an auteur. Following in the footsteps of inaugural honoree Christopher Nolan, Mangold received a Trailblazer Award during the Celebrating Sundance…

Read More
#‘The Things You Kill’ Review: A Slow-Burn Turkish Drama That Gets Weirder, and Deadlier, as the Plot Thickens

#‘The Things You Kill’ Review: A Slow-Burn Turkish Drama That Gets Weirder, and Deadlier, as the Plot Thickens

Writer-director Alireza Khatami is known for a pair of semi-experimental dramas — 2017’s Oblivion Verses and 2023’s Terrestrial Verses (co-directed with Ali Asgari) — where he constantly toys with storytelling techniques, inserting flashes of surreal imagery without warning, or relying on a mysteriously oblique viewpoint to narrate the action. If the content of his films…

Read More
#‘Rabbit Trap’ Review: Ineffectual Welsh Folk Horror Drops Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen Into Ancient Woodland Hokum

#‘Rabbit Trap’ Review: Ineffectual Welsh Folk Horror Drops Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen Into Ancient Woodland Hokum

A tradition stretching back to genre pioneers like 1973’s pagan freakout The Wicker Man, British folk horror can be bonkers (Alex Garland’s Men), hypnotically abstract (Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men) or disorienting (Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth). What it ideally shouldn’t be is boring. Bryn Chainey’s Rabbit Trap has a creepy sense of dread, striking images…

Read More
#Conan O’Brien Reveals How He’s “Embracing” Oscar Host Job in Wake of Tragic L.A. Wildfires And His Plans to Deliver a “Show That Meets the Moment”

#Conan O’Brien Reveals How He’s “Embracing” Oscar Host Job in Wake of Tragic L.A. Wildfires And His Plans to Deliver a “Show That Meets the Moment”

Hosting the Academy Awards has already been proven to be one of Hollywood’s toughest gigs but doing so in the wake of L.A.’s most catastrophic wildfires makes it even more challenging. Especially considering that it seems everyone has an opinion about how, why and if it should even proceed at all given the present circumstances….

Read More