Screen Anarchy

Once we have all survived the most lovey dovey of days on the yearly calendar we may turn our attention to what our friends at Shudder have planned for us during the month of March.    Highlight films are the horror thriller Rule of Jenny Pen, slasher comedy Bloody Axe Wound and folk horror Starve Acre. Programming mainstay The Last Drive In returns with watch parties every Friday night.    Another cool bit of programming is the inclusion of the original Evil Dead from Sam Raimi and Fede Alvarez’s contemporary remake on March 15th. For subscribers in the U.S. Raimi’s sequel, the horror comedy Army of Darkness also begins streaming on that day.    What’s that? You want century-old horror flicks to watch? Keep your…

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In the retro-futuristic, pop-punk imagination of Spanish Columbian writer-director Gala del Sol (Natalia Hermida) and her unmissable, queer-coded feature-length debut, Rains Over Babel (Llueve Sobre Babel), Cali, Colombia exists in a sublime liminal space, at the crossroads between the real and the fantastical, the natural and the supernatural, and the material (body) and the immaterial (soul). There’s nothing like Rains Over Babel and chances are, nothing like Rains Over Babel will follow it, at least not anytime soon.    Rains Over Babel centers on the “Babel” of the title, a nightclub bar that doubles as the nexus for del Sol’s ambitiously ambiguous version of Purgatory-on-Earth. Nominally owned and operated by Gian Salai (John Alex Castillo), the nightclub hosts all manner of natural and supernatural events,…

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A lone medieval knight follows a mysterious woman to a forbidden realm to help her battle an army of demons and steal the power of the gods.

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Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov offers an unvarnished and unflinching look at the frontlines of the Russo-Ukrainian war.

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Plus: ‘Withnail and I,’ ‘How to Get Ahead in Advertising,’ ‘The Wind Will Carry Us,’ ‘The Three Musketeers/The Four Musketeers,’ and in 4K: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,’ ‘In the Heat of the Night.’

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Elections have consequences, as pundits keep reminding us. One of those is Florida’s “stand your ground” legislation, which allows the use of deadly force if people feel they are in imminent danger. Composed almost entirely of bodycam and surveillance video, The Perfect Neighbor examines a notorious “stand your ground” incident in detail. For months, Susan Lorincz complained about her Ocala, Florida, neighborhood. She phoned the police repeatedly about trespassers, berated children playing in the yard next to her house, confiscated toys, and even took one child’s iPad. Tensions escalated until Lorincz shot and killed Ajike “AJ” Shantrell Owens, a mother who tried to confront her. The homicide took place on June 2, 2023. Lorincz was found guilty a year-and-a-half later and sentenced to 25 years…

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“Lowbrow maximalist illustrations brimming with thoughtful puns, juicy buns, and innuendo.” This is how illustrator Hamburger Hands (aka Kyle Schneider) describes his work, here for the 22nd Calgary Underground Film Festival, and its key art. It is an ode to Underground Comix and a fantasy mis-adventure besides. In its pink, orange, and fecund ochre-green glory, it also plays like a choose-your-own-adventure novel. Here be dragons. (And please, do mind the Arcane Fung.)…

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A character study, a dark comedy, a social satire, with a sly revenge thriller snuck in for good measure, Antonio Méndez Esparza’s portentously titled Something Is About To Happen has a lot going on in its two-hour runtime. One might think too much, if it were not its gripping central performance from Malena Alterio who as Lucia, transforms from a meek and miserable IT support worker balancing her time with daily errands and care for her dementia stricken father, to a risk happy taxi driver with a serious case of carpe diem. The film, both formally and feverishly, blends the mundane struggle of making ends meet in the big city, with the extreme highs and lows of operatic events. 

 Lucia is introduced, dwarfed by…

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The title of writer-director Sophie Brooks’s feature-length debut, Oh, Hi!, an anti-rom-com, appears almost immediately in an exchange between longtime best friends, Iris (Molly Gordon) and Max (Geraldine Viswanathan).   Usually saved for a moment combining surprise and levity, here “Oh, hi!” has a more ominous, sinister feeling, the result of Iris confessing she’s done a very “bad thing” with said bad thing involving her currently absent boyfriend, Isaac (Logan Lerman).   Just as quickly, Brooks hits the rewind button, flashing back to earlier the same weekend as Iris and Isaac, casual daters apparently on their first weekend getaway, drive to a rural rental in upstate New York. Exchanging the usual banter typical of still-new couples, singing along to the radio, and stopping by a…

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In co-writer/director Meera Menon’s (Equity, Farah Goes Bang) post-apocalyptic zombie tale, Didn’t Die, a zombie-filled life is barely worth living.   As always, staying alive means not just dodging the walking dead and their appetites for human flesh, but also keeping yourself fed, securing adequate housing, and if needed, keeping your motor vehicle gassed up and in working order. Get those basics down and you stand a chance of surviving the next zombie attack or unwelcome poacher or human thief.    Then too there’s the overriding problem of what to do when you’re all set for the immediate, post-apocalyptic future. For Vinita (Kiran Deol, a wry, welcome presence), that means continuing her long-running podcast/radio series, “Didn’t Die,” a rolling interview show co-produced with her younger…

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