Michael Snydel

[Review] In a Valley of Violence

Since the start of the millennium, Ti West has been pigeonholed as a horror director, but even from the beginning, his interest in the genre moved far beyond c...

[Review] The Blackcoat’s Daughter

Osgood Perkins’ debut feature, The Blackcoat’s Daughter - originally known as February at its premiere at TIFF last year - is a stylish exercise in dread, teas...

[Review] Diary of a Chambermaid

About halfway through both Jean Renoir’s and Luis Buñuel’s interpretations of Octave Mirbeau’s 1900 class satire, A Diary of A Chambermaid, there’s a scene whe...

[Review] Pervert Park

There are few conversational taboos more likely to cause arguments than sex offenders. For some, the mere mention of their existence is enough to make blood bo...

[Review] Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising

Originally released during a wave of enjoyable-but-disposable raunchy comedies, the first Neighbors was a trojan horse. Underneath a gleeful prank war arms rac...

[Review] Search Party

Scot Armstrong’s Search Party, which is packed to the gils with comedic talent -- most of whom, thankfully, have found work that’s more tailored to their abili...

[Review] Dark Horse

Like its namesake mutt, Dream Alliance, Dark Horse is an easy documentary to underestimate -- an archetypal underdog story of a working-class town coming toget...

[Review] Viktoria

Loosely based on a stranger than fiction story of a Bulgarian baby born without a belly button and umbilical cord, the expansive Viktoria is part-political alle...

[Review] Sworn Virgin

Laura Bispuri’s moving, fiery Sworn Virgin comes in a recent tradition of cinematic meditations on gender as a form of identity like Tomboy and All About My Mo...