In 2025, Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu, an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose work is experimental, conceptual, avant-garde, and philosophic, began working with an antique hand-cranked projector from 1909, and this experience led her to reflect on the evolution of film and experiment with the process, which included painting by hand directly on the film. She treated the film not as individual frames, but as hundreds of feet of scroll paintings that flowed before her eyes as the gears in the projector were turned by her own hand. She described the feeling as a boat sailing, or the wind singing. The title of the film is derived from an old Chinese anecdote.”Having heard the wind pass by countless times, one has finally come to realize the landscape of life, the Dao of life.”
Trauma always has a tendency to stick, or for some, stay under their skin. The past can be brought up in ways we may not expect it to. For some, love (good or bad) is one of those traumas that linger. Sotto la Pelle(Under The Skin) is a short film that shows how easily, and how simply, trauma can be brought back into someone’s life.
my own box is a quasi-documentary about artist Alice Rende and it shows some behind the scenes and explanation into her new project, Fora. In her show Fora, Rende forces herself to contort her body in a very confined space (a glass box) and when she decides to escape the box, her body is left still contorting to the box she has since been able to escape. Fora is a demonstration of conforming to social norms, the effects of doing so, and the end result of a person confined to such small spaces.
It makes sense that James Wan would latch onto Kane Parsons, recently serving as producer on Parsons' film adaptation of his cult web series Backrooms. Long before horror fans became obsessed with liminal spaces, Wan was exploring just such an idea through his Insidious franchise. The series features its own liminal realm, known as "The Further," a sort of demonic buffer zone between this world and the next. Practically every entry in the series climaxes with someone entering The Further to defeat some form of evil, but it never really took advantage of the eeriness of liminal spaces.
There is an unsettling feeling throughout Your Lips Never Left Mine that makes almost everything happening onscreen feel questionable. Written and directed by Matthew Kozlark, the indie mystery-thriller follows Lara, played by Cassandra Due, a young woman who takes a job tutoring Connor, played by Theodore Dalton, the son of a wealthy finance couple at their secluded summer lake house. What begins as a seemingly normal summer job quickly becomes more complicated as Lara realizes there is much more to this family than they are willing to reveal. The film slowly uncovers pieces of their past, creating a mystery filled with unexpected twists that keep the audience questioning who can actually be trusted.
It makes sense that James Wan would latch onto Kane Parsons, recently serving as producer on Parsons' film adaptation of his cult web series Backrooms. Long before horror fans became obsessed with liminal spaces, Wan was exploring just such an idea through his Insidious franchise. The series features its own liminal realm, known as "The Further," a sort of demonic buffer zone between this world and the next. Practically every entry in the series climaxes with someone entering The Further to defeat some form of evil, but it never really took advantage of the eeriness of liminal spaces.
Irish writer/director Kate Dolan's excellent 2022 feature debut You Are Not My Mother marked her as a horror filmmaker to keep an eye on. Blumhouse certainly had their eyes on Dolan, snapping her up to direct a movie in the M3GAN franchise. The result is Soulm8te (the movie itself mocks that clunky title). An unfair victim of the disastrous box office performance of last year's M3GAN 2.0, Dolan's film was pulled from its theatrical slot and dumped onto VOD. Any connections to the M3GAN universe that may have previously existed have been scrubbed, resulting in a standalone killer sexbot thriller.
We've gotten so many shark movies in the last few years that at this point they've all begun to blur into one big mess of chum. The core issue with this crowded sub-genre is that there simply aren't enough variations on the theme. The best of the recent crop, Dangerous Animals, worked because it gave us a human serial killer who was arguably scarier than the sharks. Every other recent shark movie carries on the tradition set by 2003's Open Water, that of characters becoming stranded in a body of water that unfortunately for them, happens to be infested with man-eaters (watch out or they'll chew you up).
Pregnancy horror movies fall into one of two categories. There are those, like Rosemary's Baby, that play out during the pregnancy term, and there are others, like It's Alive, that focus on the horrors that arise once the child is born. They all tend to share a female protagonist's fear that her child, whether it's inside or outside of her womb, is something monstrous.
