Director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell began the Insidious franchise in 2010. The first Insidious featured Patrick Wilson as Josh Lambert, Rose Byrne as his wife Renai, Ty Simpkins as their son Dalton and Lin Shaye as the medium Elise Rainier. It concerned a family looking to prevent evil spirits from trapping their comatose…
Nosferatu meets The Devil Wears Prada meets Analyze This! in Renfield. In the hands of director Chris McKay (The Lego Batman Movie), Renfield has a lot going for it, but also has a few bats loose in the belfry. The film cleverly takes a minor character from Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula – the count’s deranged…
The latest film from Brandon Cronenberg (son of legendary Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg) is a hybrid mix of sci-fi, horror and trenchant social commentary. He takes on class, wealth, privilege, artistic conceits, power, western decadence, guilt and the breakdown of civilization. It comes across like a fevered, darker and more transgressive variation on the recent…
It’s been fifty years since the horror classic The Exorcist hit screens and scared the bejesus out of audiences. Since then there have been many other films that have delved into the demonic possession genre. The Pope’s Exorcist is the latest in a long line of such films and it ticks off all the usual…
In Ti West’s prequel to X (2022), Pearl (Mia Goth) is a star in the making – at least in her own head. It’s 1918, and the combination of WWI and the Spanish flu has many on tenterhooks. Pearl’s husband Howard (Alistair Sewell) – a good man – is off fighting. She lives on a…
The play starts with a heartfelt warning from one of the characters that only tragedy puts you on the map. A plea to save ourselves as it is too late for her rings out. Hence begins the tale of an unremarkable mining town in Tasmania beset by evil. It is called Bluewater and after a chequered history it…
In M. Night Shyamalan’s intriguing psychological thriller, Knock at the Cabin, Kristen Cui plays eight-year-old Wen – a bright young girl who collects grasshoppers so she can study them. She’s special because she was adopted by her two dads – Andrew (Ben Aldridge) and Eric (Jonathan Groff) – when she was only a baby. Now…
When the most advanced “toy” in history goes rogue, lives are at stake in Gerard Johnstone’s engaging horror sci-fi thriller M3gan. Nine-year-old Cady (Violet McGraw) is on a trip to the snow with her parents when she is in a car accident that leaves her bloodied and claims their lives. That leaves her in the…
Luca Guadagnino is a singular filmmaker. After three intimate dramas in I am Love (2009), A Bigger Splash (2015) and Call Me By Your Name (2017), he pivoted to the blood-soaked remake of Suspiria (2018). Now he’s back with Bones and All, a film that merges his gentle, lyrical style with another hefty dose of…
Cecilia – known as Sissy – is a charming, good natured influencer relaying messages of positivity to her 200,000 followers. It’s a far cry from her days as a pre-teen when she and her BFF Emma vowed to grow old together. They even buried a time capsule containing video footage of their shared affection. Now…
