Four Time Film School Dropout - Independent & arthouse film criticism

Maryland Film Festival 2026: Ugly Cry Review – A Self-Authored Debut Worth Discovering

Emily Robinson’s Ugly Cry captures the psychological toll of performance—not only as an artistic pursuit, but as a condition of […]

Gabriel Azorín and Celso Giménez’s film frames its central group as soldiers recounting past tactical glories while searching for a

There remains a strange reluctance, even now, to call The Silence of the Lambs a horror film. Jonathan Demme’s 1991

Andrius Blazevicius’s How to Divorce During War operates in dual registers—an intimate marital drama unfolding within the shadow of geopolitical

Yennifer Uribe Alzate’s Skin in Spring positions itself as a day-in-the-life portrait of a single mother attempting to reclaim a

Ke-Yin Pan’s Family Matters arrives as a quietly assured directorial debut—one that understands the emotional architecture of family not through

Santiago Lozano Álvarez’s I Saw Three Black Lights is a film rooted in spiritual inquiry, but defined by narrative restraint—a

The Other Son is a quietly devastating coming-of-age drama—one that understands adolescence not as a period of discovery, but as

Yuriyan Retriever makes her directorial debut with Mag Mag, a film that aims to revive the bone-deep terror of Japanese

Julia Ducournau’s Alpha continues her ongoing fascination with bodies, identity, and familial bonds under pressure, framing what is, at its