Screen Anarchy

A young girl endures brutalization at the hands of her caregivers in a Guatemalan home for girls in Rita, director Jayro Bustamante’s eagerly anticipated follow up to the critically acclaimed La Llorona. Bustamante once again draws from his country’s dark past to create a magical realist horror fantasy filled with spirits, faeries, and angels in conflict with the evil that men do. It’s a harrowing, heartbreaking examination of both the oppression of the downtrodden and the exploitation that lead to a real-life 2017 tragedy that claimed the lives of forty-one young girls, and it is exceptional. When we meet Rita (Giuliana Santa Cruz), she is on her way to an institution designed to care for wayward girls. She’s just run away from her abusive father…

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Soulmates Eric (Skarsgård) and Shelly (FKA twigs) are brutally murdered when the demons of her dark past catch up with them. Given the chance to save his true love by sacrificing himself, Eric sets out to seek merciless revenge on their killers, traversing the worlds of the living and the dead to put the wrong things right.     When the dust settles in a couple weeks after some good old box office dominance studios like Lionsgate will be left hoping for what remains of the Summer box office.   This weekend at SDCC they’re all doing their darndest to remind everyone that there are still more movies coming out. Rupert Sanders’ news incantation of The Crow, starring Bill Skarsgård, FKA twigs, and Danny Huston, is…

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This beautiful watercolour poster for Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos’s The Second is hiding a subtle secret in plain sight. The short film centres around a pistols-at-dawn kind of duel, and the underlying complexity of motivations across two generations. The lead character, featured in portrait in the key art, is played by actor Paul Sun-Hyung Lee with a quiet restraint and stoicism. He not the duelist, rather he is the armourer, advocate, and negotiator, for the gunfighter – also known as the Second. The title of the short is a further play on words, considering the duelist is his son, i.e. the second generation, living in the shadow of his father’s success. 

   Co-writer and co-director, Taylor Ramos (also animator and illustrator) is the designer of the key…

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My Sweet Land of Sareen Hairabedian was one of the stronger films in a small but mostly strong feature documentary competition section of the 2024 Amman International Film Festival. The film gained not only the International Film Critics Fipresci Award but was also honoured with Jury and Audience Awards. The movie was finished in 2023 after a six years smeared out production process, including a one and half year long editing process together with editor Raphaëlle Martin-Hölger. When asked about it, director – cinematographer Hairabedian decribed the process as ‘delicate’. My Sweet Land weaves in finely tuned and empathic cinéma vérité style, those big and personal stories together that history is made of. Ambitious and easy to fail, but it doesn’t. It finds in a…

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Freddie Prinze Jr. and Monica Potter star in a domestic thriller The Girl in the Pool. It is a reunion of the two stars who first acted together in the rom com Head Over Heels in 2001. Here they play husband and wife and his infidelity may just get the better of him.   On his birthday, Tom’s life collapses when his mistress is found dead in his pool. Terrified of the consequences, and desperate to protect his family, he conceals the truth, triggering a chaotic night that threatens to unravel his perfect life.   We have an exclusive clip to share with you this afternoon, to give you a taste of what to expect. In the clip Freddie tries to keep his daughter from discovering…

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A true crime podcaster heading home for Christmas finds herself in the middle of a murder spree that she has to solve before she becomes the next victim in Alice Maio Mackay’s Carnage for Christmas. Mackay’s latest feature marks her first entry into the fertile ground that is holiday horror. Though the film veers more toward the classic detective story for much of its frenetic seventy-minute runtime, Carnage for Christmas never skimps on the gore when it’s time for the axe to fall. These competing tones make for a somewhat uneven film, but the film is still an undeniable leap forward for the filmmaker who already has numerous features under her belt at the tender age of nineteen. Twenty-something trans true-crime buff Lola (Jeremy Moineau)…

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A painfully bland office worker gets his world turned upside down by a trio of tiny cosmic weirdos in Steven Kostanski’s latest gonzo comedy, Frankie Freako. After hit cult comedy gold with 2021’s Psycho Goreman, Kostanski and his usual bunch of misfit miscreant co-conspirators are back with their version of an ‘80s puppet adventure movie. He lovingly borrows from the greats in this long thought extinct subgenre to create a gooey, chaotic, freaky family film with a twist. It’s everything you miss if you – like me – list Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College in your personal top ten of all time. Conor (Conor Sweeney) is the most boring, milquetoast man who ever lived. He spends his days at the office trying not to…

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To the familiar sounds of cicadas during a Tokyo summer, 11-year-old Karin and her father Tetsuya, leave the city by train to arrive at a countryside temple, whose caretaker is the grandfather she has never met. It is a grand old property at the edge of a forest, near a sleepy little town. Local spirits abound. Wait. Does this all sound kind of familiar?   After 40 years of Studio Ghibli creating masterpiece after masterpiece, the studio was sold off to Nippon TV at the end of last year due to a lack of any successors to its founders, Miyazaki-san who seems to have retired for real this time, after many false attempts, and Takahata-san, who passed away in 2018. Given that there many not be…

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Bursting with ingenuity and good old fashioned, “come on pals, let’s make a movie!” can-do energy, Sander Maran’s debut feature, Chainsaws Were Singing, is a gleefully gory musical romantic horror comedy that really hits the spot and proves that sometimes fun is more than enough. A gloriously overstuffed mish-mash of influences from across the genre spectrum, Chainsaws Were Singing is a love letter to low budget cinema and also a love letter to love, itself. A hyper-violent cross between films like Cannibal! The Musical, Bad Taste, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre; Chainsaws Were Singing celebrates lowbrow art in such a delightfully ridiculous way that it’s impossible not to smile. There is a lot going on in Chainsaws Were Singing, almost too much – we’ll…

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The fifth edition of the Santiago Int’l Film Festival’s Morbido Lab announced the six titles participating this year.   Variety reports that Coffee Table’s Caye Cesas and Eli Roth’s former co-writer Guillermo Amoedo will have projects there this year. Mi padre de teror Pablo Guisa Koestinger from Morbido will be there to advise.   With him they will bring Director Luis Javier Henaine (Disappear Completely) and our friend Adrian Garcia Bogliano (recently announced Someone’s At The Door) to provide mentorship as well.    All six participating titlles are in the gallery below.   Guisa looks back to predict a bright future for previous pitches from the strand, stating that several past projects are “currently in different development stages while others have become a reality, release…

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