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Animated films are a sweet spot for me. As I’m often writing about dark aspects of reality, relating horror films to the socio-political elements of our society, it’s good to hit the reset button every once in a while, if only momentarily shaking off the macabre for my own mental health. Of course, not every…
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Two junior police officers, their electrically charged boss, a goat, a cricket player, his elderly neighbor, and his communist butler, convene at a murder scene. While it may sound like it’s the start of an off-color joke, those are just the idiosyncratic suspects in Indian director Pratul Gaikwad’s screwball, surrealist comedy Dead Dead Full Dead…
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Like most movie fans, I have a love/hate relationship with M. Night Shyamalan. He’s made some of the best genre films of the last few decades, but he’s also made some of the biggest stinkers of this millennium. You simply never know what you’re going to get with a new M. Night movie, so I…
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If you’ve been following our Fantasia coverage, you might know that House of Sayuri was one of my most anticipated films of the festival. It was directed by the man who made Noroi: The Curse, one of the best found-footage movies way too many people have never heard of, and that was enough to get…
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With the recent release of Longlegs—a film that deserves every bit of hype it’s getting—it’s nice to see Nicolas Cage in the limelight again. The actor rose to fame mainly through a swathe of action movies in the late 90s/early 00s (not to mention becoming somewhat of a meme), but as his career has progressed,…
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If you’re a horror fan, you’ve probably heard something about Cuckoo by now. Maybe you’ve seen the trailer, read a review, or seen the bloody bandage spelling out the title wrapped around Hunter Schafer’s head on the poster. You know, something. Cuckoo is one of the big horror releases of the summer, continuing the tradition…
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About halfway through director Kourtney Roy’s Kryptic, a subtle pull of memory began to nag at me from my subconscious cinema. You know, that place in a cinephile’s brain where movies we love are stored, where scenes are resurrected and played back as if appearing on a screen before us. Something about the film strongly…
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The Fantasia International Film Festival features a wide range of movies. If you look through this year’s slate, you’ll see horror films, action flicks, sci-fi mind-benders, and some super inventive fantasy movies, but when I was looking through the plot synopses, the one that struck me the most was the dystopian thriller The Tenants. It…
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Sitting on the sofa in the early morning Sunday hours some years ago, I scoured the depths of Netflix for something fun, a title that would satiate my appetite for the bizarre and unconventional. This is where I typically take on a foreign animated film, a dramatic indie sci-fi title, or an offbeat introspective horror…
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There are a few ways to get me excited about a movie. Sometimes I love the genre, other times it’s the filmmakers involved, and still other times it’s the source material. But when I first heard about Steppenwolf, something else caught my eye. The Fantasia plot synopsis described this film as “a Kazakh Mad Max,”…