Tag: review

Screening Room: ‘Backrooms’ is Horror Cinema’s ‘Lost’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

I wrote about the new horror hit Backrooms and a certain TV show whose promise and disappointments it resembles for PopMatters:

To  begin, aside from the required warning that spoilers follow, let us stipulate that what happened in movie theaters in the early summer of 2026 was a good thing for the art and the industry. While jumped-up Disney streaming series and feature-length stuffed toy ad The Mandalorian and Grogu (Jon Favreau) strained to find an audience, filmgoers and industry-watchers were instead transfixed by a pair of new horror films from 20-something directors. Curry Barker’s haunted-girlfriend screamer, Obsession, looks to be the launchpad for an inventive genre director with plenty of tricks up his sleeve. Although Kane Parsons’ Backrooms is one of the freshest bits of guerrilla weirdness to have taken over the multiplex in a long time, the film’s looseness and sprawl may suggest a relatively shallow fictional universe that undercuts its groundbreaking potential…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Elton John: Never Too Late’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film - New, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment
Elton John and John Lennon backstage at Madison Square Garden, 1974. (Sam Emerson)

The new documentary Elton John: Never Too Late just premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. It should be coming relatively soon to Disney+.

My review ran at The Playlist:

The makers of “Elton John: Never Too Late” wisely didn’t try to be completists. After a half-century-plus of touring as well as recording approximately eleventy thousand albums and musicals, attempting a complete survey of Elton John’s output in one film is a fool’s errand. However, the film ends up covering enough of his career that the resulting gaps are more noticeable than they should be. Viewers will leave the movie with a good-enough appreciation of his work, but not necessarily any deeper an understanding of the man than could be gleaned from viewing “Rocketman“…

Screening Room: ‘Love in the Time of Fentanyl’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film - New, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

I reviewed the documentary Love in the Time of Fentanyl from DOC NYC for The Playlist:

Almost everything viewers need to know about the mortal consequences of the fentanyl epidemic portrayed in Colin Askey’s new Vancouver-set documentary “Love in the Time of Fentanyl” is contained in one exchange between two users. One man talks about how coming off heroin was hard but manageable, essentially Netflix and chilling in his apartment for a week—but detoxing from fentanyl? That led to the emergency room. Given that and the spread of fentanyl throughout the city’s illicit drug supply, it is easier to understand the argument for the safe-injection site which the film documents. At the same time, seeing that site as anything but a Band-Aid on a grievous wound is hard…

It should be playing later this year on PBS’s Independent Lens.

Here’s the trailer: