Director Mali Elfman brings the existential feels with her sci-fi/drama Next Exit. What starts as an odd-couple road trip movie slowly shifts into a thoughtful and very human drama. Tackling themes of regret, love, loss, and death, Elfman is able to create a sense of unease as it relates to her characters, and as they grow and more is revealed, the filmmaking feels more personal with increasingly intimate shots and framing. 

Rahul Kohli and Katie Parker play the traveling duo, and Kohli's natural screen presence and disarming demeanor give the audience a way in emotionally right off the bat. His recent roles in Haunting of Bly Manor and Midnight Mass, along with a leading role here showcase his talents. (This man needs bigger roles.)

Elfman shows great promise as a burgeoning director. Connecting audiences emotionally to the story is not an easy feat and there is great restraint to keep this from devolving into a hackneyed love story. Having her father, Danny Elfman, do the music helps set the mood as well. Next Exit is not without its issues, but the film delivers a compelling drama with just enough sci-fi and the right amount of humanity. Grade: B —Joel Winstead

A Dario Argento film through and through, Dark Glasses is reminiscent of recent Brian De Palma features where a filmmaker’s familiar themes and tropes receive a modern sheen thanks to upgraded technology. Here, the tale of a serial killer targeting prostitutes in Rome gives the director plenty of opportunities to showcase his gifts for staging gratuitous, exaggerated bloodshed, as well as chase scenes, namely a showstopper in which would-be victim Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli) is knocked into a grisly automobile accident by the murderer.

Moments between subsequent attacks as Diana adjusts to blindness with the help of aid worker Rita (Asia Argento), a seeing-eye dog, and the Asian preteen (Andrea Zhang) who survived the wreck in the other car prove less compelling, and the overlong finale is more a comedy of errors than a feast of giallo tension. Still, for Argento’s first film in a decade, Dark Glasses suggests he’s still a highly capable director, albeit one with arguably not much new to say. Grade: B-minus —Edwin Arnaudin

With Renaud Gauthier's third feature film, Punta Sinistra, the director tries to create a throwback to the B-horror movies and Italian horror films of the ’70s via colorful lighting and dubbed dialogue. Filmed on location in Mexico with a micro crew and budget, the glaring production limitations clearly lean into its aesthetic, but it never sticks the landing of being its own film or being a homage to the films it really wants to be.

Also problematic is a story so convoluted that a "twist" near the end proves impossible to follow. The turn, which requires a voiceover and the main character asking the audience to pay close attention, proceeds to fill viewers in on what actually happened, but with the editing, there’s no way to determine a timeline and the reveal almost feels like the editors made a mistake. For a film to succeed in its imitation of a low-budget ’70s horror film, there has to be better execution of all its elements. The visuals and the lighting are all there, but the film itself falls completely flat. At a 63-minute runtime, the pain you have to endure is brief, but it's packed so fully with incomprehensible dialogue and unnecessary plot details that it feels doubly long. These types of films have been done with great success, but this is not one of them. Grade: F —JW

(Photos courtesy of the Fantasia International Film Festival)