The season is upon us. As the leaves fall off their trees, the weather whooshes in a welcomed cold breeze, the accustomed costumes come out of their storage, and the pumpkins, along with the scented candles, beers, lattes and what-have-you, make their way into the public’s affection, it swiftly becomes none other than the season of the witch. And what a glorious time of the year that can be — particularly for us horror fans.

Continue reading 20 Of The Best, Most Spellbinding Witch Movies at The Playlist.

“I’ve been working on, at no one’s request, ‘Kafka’ for 14 years. I have an idea, I have an approach. It was a movie I was never really happy with even at the time,“ Steven Soderbergh said last year about his forever developing recut of his 1991. I think his film starring Jeremy Irons, which spins a surreal tale around the famous author, is a bit of an underrated gem, but clearly the filmmaker wishes he could’ve done things differently.

Continue reading Steven Soderbergh Says His “Radical” Re-Edit Of ‘Kafka’ Might Be Finished Soon, Praises ‘Get Out’ & ‘The Love Witch’ at The Playlist.

It’s one down and hopefully many more to come for the American Independent Film Awards. The group issued their inaugural awards over the weekend, celebrating the best films of 2016 that worked with budgets of $1 million or less.

Leading the pack with five wins was Trey Edward Shults‘ “Krisha,” as it picked up Best Film, Best Director, Best Lead Performance, Best Score, and Best Original Screenplay.

Continue reading ‘Krisha’ Leads The Winners At The Inaugural American Independent Film Awards at The Playlist.

Every year when I do this, I try to find a theme among the films that stuck with me for the year. Sometimes it’s women directors or the American Dream or the triumph of the human spirit. I find that those themes run through this list as well, from Mike Mills’ “20th Century Women” to Andrea Arnold’s “American Honey” to Jim Jarmusch’s “Paterson.” But as I was writing this, a theme revealed itself to me, a theme of “this movie shouldn’t work but it does,” encompassing, yes “Paterson” as well as “Toni Erdmann,” and “Camerperson.” Each one of these films feels like a small miracle, that it was even made, that it emerged so singularly formed.

Continue reading Katie Walsh’s Top 10 Films Of 2016 at The Playlist.

There’s too much TV, too many films, and there have been a few other things going on in 2016. So for sure, there are very few of us, even among the fraternity of full-time film commentators, who can say they’ve seen everything. Thus, here’s our annual roundup of the films we feel most likely either fell off your radar while you built your nuclear bunker, disappeared from their short runs while you attended an underground resistance meeting, or languished in your Netflix queue while you researched alternate-universe theory and the likelihood of a life-sustaining nearby planet being discovered in the next four years.

Continue reading The 25 Best 2016 Films You Might Not Have Seen at The Playlist.

Maybe it was just because it provided a respite from the year’s most terrifying drama, “American Horror Story: The 2016 Presidential Election,” but the past 12 months have been unusually good for the horror movie. In a year where franchise after franchise underperformed, horror films remained a consistent draw in multiplexes, and for the most part with new original movies rather than the umpteenth sequel or reboot of “Friday The 13th,” “Saw” or “Paranormal Activity.”

Away from mainstream theaters, there was great stuff too, whether it was Netflix getting into the scary game with a pair of excellent low-key chillers, A24 having their biggest hit ever with a Sundance fave, a couple of inventive Korean pics, or arthouse crossovers drawing on fears from Iran and Portugal.

Continue reading The 15 Best Horror Films Of 2016 at The Playlist.

It’s too bad that who dismissively write off 2016 as “a bad movie year” couldn’t find more than a few films to treasure across the last twelve months. Sure, blockbuster movies were pretty terrible all around, but even a glimpse of indie cinema and foreign films this year (South Korea alone yielded the excellent likes of “The Handmaiden,” “The Wailing” and “Age Of Shadows“) reveals some tremendous work.

Continue reading Celebrating The Films Of 2016 at The Playlist.

Anna Biller’s delicious debut —the stylish, technicolor-esque “The Love Witch”— is like nothing you’ve seen before. Or at least nothing you’ve likely seen in decades. A throwback and campy “horror” movie, “The Love Witch” is part softcore erotica, part ‘60s pulpy psychedelia and a hybrid of influences like “Vampyros Lesbos,” “The Wicker Man,” the films of Russ Meyer, Jess Franco and countless sexploitation movies from the 1960s and ‘70s.

Continue reading The Movies That Changed My Life: ‘The Love Witch’ Director Anna Biller at The Playlist.

This is a reprint of our review from the 2016 Fantasia Film Festival.

MONTREAL — The first thing that you notice about Anna Biller‘s “The Love Witch,” making its Canadian Premiere at the Fantasia Film Festival, is how strikingly beautiful of a movie it is. Shot on 35mm, its look is inspired by 1960s sexploitation and Technicolor melodramas. It is sumptuous in its eye-popping photography filled with relentless color and incredibly impressive and precise costume design.

Continue reading ‘The Love Witch’ Is A Sumptuous, Eye-Popping, Over-The-Top Treat [Review] at The Playlist.

MONTREAL — The first thing that you notice about Anna Biller’s “The Love Witch,” making its Canadian Premiere at the Fantasia Film Festival, is how strikingly beautiful of a movie it is. Shot on 35mm, its look is inspired by 1960s sexploitation and Technicolor melodramas. It is sumptuous in its eye-popping photography filled with relentless color and incredibly impressive and precise costume design.

Its plot of a modern-day witch named Elaine (Samantha Robinson) that relentlessly, but good-hardheartedly, concocts magical spells to get men to fall in love with her, can seem like a throwaway compared to the actual, eye-candy imagery Biller has created.

Continue reading Technicolor Wonder ‘The Love Witch’ May Just Be A New Cult Classic [Review] at The Playlist.