Screen Anarchy

Zombies in a mall, you say? It’s been done before but leave it to Korean genre master Yeon Song-ho to take everything you think you know about the living dead and crank it up to eleven and you’ve got another certified classic in Colony, enjoying its North American premiere this weekend at the New York Asian Film Festival. Colony opens at a biotech conference taking place and the Dongwoori high rise complex. One floor hosts tech talks while various other levels host a number of shopping and office spaces. While a keynote speaker extols the endless possibilities of adapting natural biocommunication among slime moulds as a way of moving medical science forward, the rest of the building goes on about their business. What no one…

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When her fiancé Tom (Michael Cassidy) cashes in his celebrity hall pass in the back room of a local bookstore, poor Gail Daughtry (Zoey Deutch) is heartbroken. What was once a whimsical thought exercise has now become very real. The only way to make things right is for her to even the score with her famous crush, Mad Men hunk, Jon Hamm. It won’t be easy, but nothing worthwhile ever is in David Wain’s Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass. Co-written by Wain and Ken Marino of The State and Wet Hot American Summer fame, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is a loving and knowing nod to the glamour and nonsense of Hollywood. The film takes a ridiculous tour of Tinseltown through…

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Some films never die. They just keep demanding sacrifices.   In the case of The Wicker Man (1973), those sacrifices have been many and varied: Those made in the service of shooting and releasing the film, and dealing with financial fallout. The effort and energy expended by scholars, historians, and critics attempting to assign meaning to it. The money spent on tickets, physical media, and other memorabilia by a growing group of rabid fans, of which I am one.   There have also been two other films: The remake The Wicker Man (2006) and director Robin Hardy’s sequel, The Wicker Tree (2011), neither of which fared particularly well with critics or audiences.    But Children of the Wicker Man (2024) is a film that gives far…

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Ngozi Onwurah’s radical Afrofuturist vision from 1995 got a new 2K Restoration and will start screening in New York on July 31st before a national rollout.

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Plus: ‘Moana,’ ‘Mockbuster,’ ‘Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,’ ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran,’ ‘Black Chariot,’ ‘Crossing.’

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This is the third time that Spanish art director and designer Octavio Terol Bernabé has been featured in this column. Previous designs both made the Top 10 posters of 2025. It is safe to say that we are fans of his work. His painterly design for Vittoria Rizzardi Peñalosa’s short, Woman, Dying, makes fine use of negative space, and texture in a film about a quiet life-drawing class’s descent into chaos when a death occurs during a break.  The black and white sketch of a naked woman, relaxed, willingly exposed in repose, has a curtain of red descending upon her. If you look long enough, close enough, in almost a magic-eye poster kind of way, you will see an observing human face. The credit block and…

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We arrive at the penultimate day of the 2026 Neuchatel International Fantastic Film Festival, located in the heart of Switzerland, where the only Swiss festival dedicated to genre films has held sway for the past week. Overlooking a beautiful lake, Neuchatel is known as the center of the Swiss watch industry, and is perfect for strolling at a leisurely pace. The festival takes advantage of its setting with time set aside every day for exploring board games and various virtual worlds. Throughout the festival, varied theatrical events have also been staged. Today, for example, is Arts de rue : Réaction en chaîne”, which has a very inviting description: “Samuelito creates a whole obstacle course full of twists and turns and adventure to make candy fly…

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Unnecessary. Redundant. Superfluous. Three English-language words that describe the same or similar experience in life or fiction.   Any one of those words, alone or collectively, can also describe Moana, the less-than-anticipated live-action remake of the 10-year-old animated hit that enthralled audiences in theaters and has done likewise at home since its release. The original animated film proved so popular that it almost spawned an animated series. Instead, Disney scrapped those plans and pushed forward with developing the aptly named sequel, Moana 2, just two years ago.   With an overwhelmingly inescapable feeling of “too much, too soon” permeating every aspect of its preproduction, production, and now release, the live-action remake once again stars Dwayne Johnson as Maui, an egocentric, worship-seeking trickster demi-god on a…

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The New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF) and Film at Lincoln Center today unveiled the second wave of programming for its landmark 25th edition, adding more than 40 films to an already wide-ranging lineup, with very special final titles still to come. Running from July 10 to July 26 across five New York venues, including Film at Lincoln Center, SVA Theatre, IFC Center, Anthology Film Archives, and the Korean Cultural Center New York, NYAFF 2026 marks a major milestone for North America’s leading festival of Asian cinema. This year’s festival includes Yeon Sangho (Train to Busan)’s Colony as an Opening Night film, Na Hongjin’s acclaimed Cannes sensation, Hope, making its North American debut and serving as a Centerpiece film, and closing with Chinese breakout film…

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Don’t tell anyone the first episode’s secret.

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