Benny Safdie directs like someone trying to pin you down on the mat and not let you up until you feel the hurt. It’s not just about fighting, it’s about how obsession hollows a person out until all that’s left is the performance.

The body as spectacle, the body as prison. Every close-up feels like it’s vibrating with exhaustion and hunger.

Can’t tell if it’s inspiring or terrifying to watch someone destroy themselves to keep going, probably both.

I spent…

You wait all festival for the one that hits like this, and somehow it still feels like you weren’t ready.

The kind of screening that reminds me why i chased a career in film writing in the first place.

Guillermo doesn’t adapt Frankenstein so much as bleed into it, a story about creation, obsession, and the unbearable weight of loneliness turned into a cathedral of light and shadow. Every frame feels hand-carved, every gesture sincere. It’s indulgent, yes, but so…

What’s most unsettling about Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile is how aggressively ordinary it wants to feel. Not in a subversive way, necessarily, but in the way the film traps itself inside Liz’s perspective so completely that horror becomes ambient. Domestic. Half heard through another room. Berlinger keeps searching for distance, in the TV broadcasts, the courtrooms, the tabloid aesthetics, but the film’s real texture is in the quieter moments where nobody fully acknowledges what’s happening. The empty pauses…

“Faces of Dracula” feels like the kind of movie that would've completely consumed me at 19 in a Bushwick sublet with a projector pointed at a peeling wall, but at 25 it hits differently, less as pure aesthetic discovery and more like watching someone desperately trying to preserve the romance of old ghosts. There’s something undeniably alluring about the film’s textures. The candlelit interiors have this bruised, velvety quality where every face looks half-erased by history. Even when scenes drift…