WATCH GREAT CINEMA

With sharp wit and cathartic intensity, Coralie Fargeat turns toxic beauty culture inside out in her Oscar®-winning latest feature. Powered by a career-best performance from Demi Moore, The Substance fearlessly bulldozes its way into the midnight-movie pantheon and the feminist canon.

Horror as a genre has long facilitated some of the most deeply felt renderings of loss in cinema. With her acclaimed film The Babadook, director Jennifer Kent picked up this mantle with a chilling treatise on the many shapes grief can take, and the battle that is motherhood. A modern horror classic.

Following Suspiria, Argento invoked the power of witches once more with this loose continuation (and part of the “Three Mothers” trilogy)—a fever dream crosscut between haunting synchronicities in New York City and Rome. Like its illustrious predecessor, Inferno is another irresistible nightmare.

Charlotte Gainsbourg took the Best Actress award in Cannes for her extraordinary performance in Lars von Trier’s controversial classic. A relentlessly powerful allegory of grief and violence, Antichrist remains one of the most harrowing and provocative horror films of all time. Chaos reigns!

Weaponizing tropes to neo-feminist ends, Coralie Fargeat fires on all cylinders in this killer film. Adrenalized by the same fascination with transformation that sparks across The Substance, the provocateur filmmaker empowers her heroine to go from Barbie to badass with dangerous, delirious style.

With a stellar performance by Haley Bennett, Swallow is a surreal and candy-colored female empowerment thriller about the struggle for bodily autonomy. Joining the ranks of remarkably terrifying films about pregnancy, this drama revives the suspenseful mood—and style—of Rosemary’s Baby.

A film shoot goes catastrophically wrong in this playful mockumentary from France’s preeminent enfant terrible, Gaspar Noé. Starring a magnificently game duo in Béatrice Dalle and Charlotte Gainsbourg, Lux Æterna is a formally dazzling, mid-length rumination on witchcraft and the filmmaking process.

Body horror must run in the family, because only a Cronenberg (David’s son, that is) could have realized this dizzying cinematic concoction of terror mixed with the darkest shades of humour. Lead by the always unnerving Caleb Landry Jones (Get Out), Antiviral is a razor-sharp satire of our time.

The kids are not alright in this bone-chilling horror tale from Eskil Vogt, famed for his writing partnership with Joachim Trier. Alert to the supernatural unease that lurks among the sleepy forests of Oslo, The Innocents punctures the edenic cocoon of childhood with disturbing, gruesome deeds.