Religious extremism and its cult-like symptoms are of intense interest to filmmaker Jorunn Myklebust Syversen, her two feature films, Hoggeren (The Three Feller) and Disco offering ample evidence of this. The two films portray cultural manipulation from the top down, with the hierarchies of religious institutions providing the confinements for their leading characters. Premiering at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Disco links professional shortcomings to a lack of belief in the holy spirit. Disco tells the story of 19-year-old Mirjam, a world champion freestyle disco dancer whose stepfather serves as pastor of the local church, Freedom. Once Mirjam’s success in […]

Less a motion picture than a picture of still photographs projected in succession, Alan Berliner’s latest documentary, Letter to the Editor, takes as its inspiration the vast photography featured in The New York Times over the past four decades. Berliner, now 63, began collecting and categorizing thousands of photographs since Ronald Reagan’s first year in the White House (1980) and continues unabated to this day, or at least until Letter to the Editor made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this past Saturday evening.  Comprised entirely of typically hi-res photographs first published in The New York Times […]

As a weighty, academic-like subgenre of the horror film, “religious horror” presents endless opportunities to explore both the occult and the minutiae of organized worship. Prepackaged with historical baggage and preconceived expectations, religious horror films play on our belief of the supernatural, however naively broad it may be; like any religion, most horror film films require some suspension of disbelief. While William Friedkin’s The Exorcist continues to stand as the most explicit cinematic example of clergy-meets-devil, other classics such as Rosemary’s Baby present a more subtle depiction of messianic workship: in an unexpected shock, the title character gives birth to […]

Working for the past several years as a directing tandem, filmmakers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead return to the Toronto International Film Festival with Synchronic, a film described by TIFF programmer Michael Lerman as “both suspenseful and subversive.” Following two paramedics based in New Orleans as they uncover a series of odd, drug-related deaths, Synchronic represents the next step forward for the two genre-filmmakers. Complete with two franchise-leading stars (Anthony Mackie of Avengers fame and Jamie Dornan of Fifty Shades of Grey), the film marks the directing duo’s return to TIFF after a five-year hiatus (when their gory foreign romance, […]

A good friend, suffering from an incurable case of acute cinephilia, recently informed me that we are “living in a golden age of horror,” citing breakout hits like Jordan Peele’s doppelgänger-dependent Us and Ari-Aster’s bucolically-tinged relationship drama Midsommar. But for every horror film remade (“reimagined”) to inspired results (Lars Klevberg’s Child’s Play), a muddled, paint-by-numbers redo isn’t far behind (Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer’s Pet Sematary). For every step forward the ever-growing Conjuring Universe took, it’s always as a result of first taking two steps back (the Nixon era period pieces The Curse of La Llorona and, to a lesser […]

A road trip movie where the destination is clear but the intent is hidden, Ognjen Glavonić’s The Load is something of a taut genre film with political subtext. Set in Yugoslavia during the 1999 Kosovo War (that ultimately concluded with the catastrophic NATO bombing that went unapproved by the UN Security Council), The Load goes micro in its study of a truck driver who’s trying to make ends meet by driving unknown cargo from one destination to another. What he’s transporting, he doesn’t bother to ask and he certainly doesn’t want to know.  Drab and dreary, war-torn and ravaged, The […]

Opening with a wedding and concluding with some kind of funeral, the horror-comedy Ready or Not is a welcomed late summer season addition. Grace (Samara Weaving) and Alex (Mark O’Brien) are married at the Le Domas family mansion. After the ceremony, the family announces that, as is tradition, they will promptly play a children’s game with (or more accurately, against) the bride, as she is the newest member of the Le Domas family and thus must pass a test. The game is Hide and Seek, and if Grace can make it to morning, she lives. If the Le Domas family […]

A conspiracy theory is meant to provide just enough information to send you tumbling down multiple dead ends, desperate for a branch of legitimacy to grasp onto. It must begin with an undoubtable event (say, the death of a famous figure) that lacks concrete evidence as to how it took place. There must be several figures who go on the record and offer conflicting reports (or provoke the sense that they’re hiding something more sinister). There must be multiple probable reasons for this event to have taken place (the famous figure had it coming, the famous figure experienced bad luck). […]

While most independent films are birthed out of personal necessity, a time-crunch, and readily available locations, Diana Peralta’s De Lo Mio may represent a pinnacle of can-do gumption. Shot on location in the city of Santiago in the Dominican Republic, Peralta’s debut feature uses her late grandmother’s home as its central location and its truer-than-fiction narrative—following her passing, two sisters return to their grandmother’s cozy property before it gets bulldozed and the land sold. Shot last fall but percolating in the director’s mind for years, De Lo Mio is as much about the sisters in front of the camera (performed by Sasha […]

A stranger in a foreign land, with a camera and a penchant for cheap beer: Andrew Hevia’s hyperdigital documentary Leave the Bus Through the Broken Window follows the Miami-bred filmmaker as he visits Hong Kong for the Chinese edition of Art Basel. At first determined to make a traditional documentary accessible for public television audiences, Hevia’s plans are quickly thwarted once he discovers the elusive intricacies of the region. He’s a Cuban-American who can’t understand the language of his new surroundings. Rather than view that as a hindrance, he takes to meeting artists and art collectors, attending art shows, wooing […]