Pink Floyd, Def Leppard, T. Rex, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Scorpions, Paul McCartney & Wings, the Alan Parsons Project, Genesis, Peter Gabriel, Electric Light Orchestra, Rainbow, Styx and more. All of these artists used Hipgnosis, the English design group made up of Storm Thorgerson, Aubrey Powell, and Peter Christopherson. They became nearly as big of rock stars as the bands they did art for.

Directed by Anton Corbijn (whose work in music videos has similarities in becoming a rock star to rock stars just like Hipgnosis) and written by Trish D Chetty, Squaring the Circle gets into the artists’ best-known work, such as Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon while hearing about the influence — and what it was like to be part of that art — thanks to interviews with McCartney, Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, David Gilmour and Nick Mason. Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page and Peter Gabriel.

Corbijin told The Hollywood Reporter, ““At 17, I started taking photos of musicians who created the soundtrack of my youth, first for magazines and later for record covers, and then trying out moving images as a director for music videos from the early ’80s onwards. It was a long road, but I eventually made feature films: my first one, Control, dealt with music I loved, and now my first documentary deals with record covers and their beauty and power, and the craziness to get there. It has been an honour to tell Hipgnosis’, Storm’s, and Po’s, story in Squaring the Circle, which, thanks to the great team at Utopia, will be a cinema release in the first half of 2023.”

This is a gorgeous film that tells me so much of what I want to know about a time and place that I want to know more about. As such, it’s nearly perfect, getting across the emotions and real people behind the art that has been made nearly mythical today.

This movie is part of the Calgary Underground Film Festival, which for twenty years has been dedicated to elevating Calgary’s cultural landscape with the best in international independent cinema. Recently, CUFF was named one of the Best Horror Festivals in the World, 2022 by Dread Central, and one of the World’s 50 Best Genre Festivals and one of 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee in 2021 by MovieMaker Magazine. CUFF continues to attract audiences with its programming of films that engage audiences and defy convention.

It’s running from now until April 30 and you can see the entire schedule here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

Practically Shakesperean in its sizable cast of characters and many subplots and twists, director Kensuke Sonomura’s Bad City is an absolute blast. Hitoshi Ozawa toplines as Torada, a detective who was set up by powerfully placed people with yakuza ties to be the suspect in the murder of a Korean gangster boss’s son. He is released temporarily to head up a secret, off-the-books trio of detectives from the Violent Crimes Unit to go after Gojo (Lily Franky), a criminal with political aspirations.

There’s intrigue galore between the cops, the yakuza, and the Korean gangsters, too much to list here and that would be spoiling things, anyway. Go in cold, knowing that you will be treated to some of the more realistic looking fight scenes in recent memory. They are choreographed, of course, but in such a manner that some fights have a real-life, somewhat deliberately sloppy look to them as opposed to looking like a well-rehearsed dance routine. And you shouldn’t get too attached to any of the protagonists.

Bad City boasts an engaging story, captivating performances, crackerjack direction, and all sorts of action, including fisticuffs, martial arts, knife fights, and gunplay. Aficionados of Asian crime cinema should consider this one required viewing.

Bad City screens as part of Calgary Underground Film Festival, which takes place in Calgary, Canada from April 20–30.

It’s easy to hate influencers. It’s simple to say social media has ruined everything. And yet, to look into oneself and the world and realize that these things just magnify how bad things are and therefore, it’s easy to blame the shiny and pretty people, because no society functions without a scapegoat.

Kurtis David Harder directed Spiral and this is worlds better than that film. Along with co-writer Tesh Gutti, he tells the story of Madison (Emily Tennant), a social influencer in Thailand who meets up with CW (Cassandra Naud), a woman with a huge birthmark on her face and creeping darkness in her soul. She brings Madison into her world, at first showing her how it’s more real than her reality to taking photos of every meal and every outfit. As Madison lies about how much she’s experiencing and pines for the end of her relationship to Ryan (Rory J. Saper), the man who got her into influencing in the first place, she’s kidnapped to CW’s special place on the island, a space that is as gorgeous as it is potentially deadly.

So yes, by all means, hate on influencers, but do not miss this film, which just plain works.

This movie is part of the Calgary Underground Film Festival, which for twenty years has been dedicated to elevating Calgary’s cultural landscape with the best in international independent cinema. Recently, CUFF was named one of the Best Horror Festivals in the World, 2022 by Dread Central, and one of the World’s 50 Best Genre Festivals and one of 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee in 2021 by MovieMaker Magazine. CUFF continues to attract audiences with its programming of films that engage audiences and defy convention.

It’s running from now until April 30 and you can see the entire schedule here.

Kaiko City is plagued with poverty and crime. When a mass murder at a bathhouse occurs and yet local businessman Wataru Gojo (Lily Franky) is acquitted, the cops realize that traditional methods no longer apply.

Three members of the Violent Crimes Unit join a disgraced former police captain in jail for murder named Torada (Hitoshi Ozawa), to get evidence on Gojo, his dealings with the yakuza and even worse — his connection to South Korean organized crime and a yearning for a career in politics.

Hitoshi Ozawa is sixty years old but has made a career of playing roles just like this: hard men willing to do hard jobs no matter the cost. You may know him from Takeshi Miike’s Dead or Alive or may even go deep and know Japanese V-cinema. He’s the best part of this very good movie. And Tak Sakiguchi (Versus) is in this as a silent killer gunning for the police.

Directed by Kensuke Sonomura and written by Ozawa, this is a film filled with twists and turns but most importantly action. It also has so much of what works in Japanese crime cinema, that being the ever-twisted connection between cops and crime, with characters that have a foot in part of each world and yet pushed and pulled by concepts like duty and honor.

But this is all about the stunts and fights, too. Sonomura has made a career in stunts, from directing the action in movies like Baby Assassins, Black Rat and The Machine Girl as well as directing Hydra. He’s also lent his fight choreography to video games including Devil May Cry 3, Devil May Cry 4, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and Resident Evil 3. He’s also choreographed the action scenes for some world-class directors including Mamoru Oshii, Yudai Yamaguchi, John Woo and Donnie Yen.

This movie is deliriously exciting. Make sure you catch it.

I saw this as part of the Calgary Underground Film Festival, which for twenty years has been dedicated to elevating Calgary’s cultural landscape with the best in international independent cinema. Recently, CUFF was named one of the Best Horror Festivals in the World, 2022 by Dread Central, and one of the World’s 50 Best Genre Festivals and one of 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee in 2021 by MovieMaker Magazine. CUFF continues to attract audiences with its programming of films that engage audiences and defy convention.

It’s running from now until April 30 and you can see the entire schedule here.

Two decades after a tragedy with her sister, Šarlota — pronounced Charlotta — comes back to her remote mountain hometown in Slovakia to claim an inheritance left by her dead mother. Yet when she gets there, her mother’s house has burned to the ground. Staying in her former neighbor’s abandoned cabin — rumored to have been a witch’s house — Šarlota remembers the misogyny, patriarchy and superstition that she had left. As she approaches a herbalist named Mira, the locals believe Šarlota must also be a witch.

A deserved winner of the Best Picture in the Cineasti del Presente Competition at the Locarno Film Festival, director Tereza Nvotová has made a movie that looks absolutely gorgeous and from another world. The witch sabbath scene in this is incredibly evocative and blew me away.

We live in a world that fears what it does not understand and seeks to hold back things of beauty and passion. These issues exist from big cities to small towns and everywhere in between; things are sliding back into a world where women no longer even have autonomy over their own bodies. Nightsiren presents a place where the power within women is challenged by old beliefs and an even older guard.

I saw this as part of the Calgary Underground Film Festival, which for twenty years has been dedicated to elevating Calgary’s cultural landscape with the best in international independent cinema. Recently, CUFF was named one of the Best Horror Festivals in the World, 2022 by Dread Central, and one of the World’s 50 Best Genre Festivals and one of 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee in 2021 by MovieMaker Magazine. CUFF continues to attract audiences with its programming of films that engage audiences and defy convention.

It’s running from now until April 30 and you can see the entire schedule here.