MovieFestUK

Adam Scott has a face built for mild inconvenience. In Parks and Recreation, it was the mild inconvenience of municipal bureaucracy. In Severance, it was the mild inconvenience of corporate dystopia. In "Hokum," it is the mild inconvenience of an ancient, festering Irish curse that wants to unspool his sanity like a cheap ball of yarn. Damian McCarthy, the maestro of subterranean claustrophobia who previously gave us Caveat and Oddity, takes Scott’s trademark tightly wound normalcy and tosses it headfirst into the muddy, blood-stained bogs of a fiercely unforgiving folk horror. The result... a gloriously nasty piece of cinematic cruelty that will make you want to scrub your skin with steel wool.

Rant Inbound...

Space is traditionally cinema’s favorite haunted house—a cold, infinitely expanding vacuum where humanity goes to learn exactly how small and doomed it is. But Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s "Project Hail Mary" takes one look at that terrifying abyss and decides it's actually the perfect setting for a buddy road trip, or rather, a buddy space trip. It's a wildly optimistic, deeply joyful film that suggests the universe may not just be a void waiting to swallow us, but a massive, wondrous laboratory waiting to be understood—preferably with a good friend in the passenger seat.

If you buy a ticket to "Mortal Kombat 2" and then bash the life out of it for lacking emotional depth, you need your cinematic license revoked. What exactly were you hoping to find? A subtle exploration of grief? Anyone marching into Simon McQuoid’s hyper-violent sequel armed with a notepad to grade its narrative gravitas has completely lost the plot. This film doesn't hide from what it is; it practically screams it while tearing out a jugular. It is a loud, wildly cheesy, outlandish, and unapologetically gory ode to a franchise built on digitized decapitations, and its greatest strength is that it never once takes itself seriously.

When the heavy iron doors of a modern correctional facility slam shut, they do more than cage the physical body; they systematically strip away the romantic illusions we harbor about justice, leaving behind a cold, feral ecosystem governed solely by survival. Cal McMau’s "Wasteman" resides entirely in this oxygen-deprived space. This is not the Hollywood fantasy of redemption behind bars, where noble men carve chess pieces and stare longingly out of barred windows. Instead, McMau has crafted a harrowing, claustrophobic nightmare that forces us to reckon with the tragic, inescapable cycle of incarceration, and the film examines how the very architecture of the system takes human potential and violently grinds it into dust.

To truly appreciate the beautiful, unhinged mind of Danny DeVito, you have to look at the genesis of his madness. Long before he was crawling naked out of leather couches or offering eggs in trying times as Frank Reynolds on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia—a role that feels like the glorious zenith of his comedic ethos—DeVito was already cultivating his signature brand of cinematic depravity behind the camera. As a massive fan who has consumed practically every frame of film he’s ever touched, I look at his 1987 directorial debut, "Throw Momma from the Train," as the Rosetta Stone for his uniquely dark and outrageous soul. It’s thrilling, it’s nasty, and it proves that DeVito has always been a master of finding absolute hilarity in the grotesque and the desperate.