With Love and a Major Organ and A Disturbance in the Force are screening as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 20 to August 9.
Annabelle (Anna Maguire) is an aspiring painter working at a customer service call center who avoids Continue reading Fantasia Festival 2023 Movie Reviews — With Love and a Major Organ, A Disturbance in the Force
Shin Kamen Rider is playing as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 20 to August 9.
During the rapid-fire in media res opening of Hideaki Anno’s Shin Kamen Rider, memories were conjured of the Power Rangers shows of my youth. People dressed in bulky-headed costumes chase each other down and then prepare to battle in clunky hand-to-hand combat. It was not a second after the film reminded me of that quaint franchise that the masked hero of the title started popping the heads of attacking grunts like ticks and cracking into their ribcages like one cracks an ice tray. Pulpy blood splattering on the nearby trees.
Then, we witness motorcyclist turned cyborg grasshopper Takeshi (Sosuke Ikematsu) as he experiences a severe panic attack brought on by the murders he just committed.
Takeshi has been engineered into something of a superhuman by an organization named S.H.O.C.K.E.R. While wearing a metallic helmet shaped like the head of a grasshopper and running a machine on his body that looks like a computer cooling fan, he can harness the power of Continue reading Fantasia Festival 2023 Movie Review: Shin Kamen Rider
Blackout, Stay Online, and Vincent Must Die are screening as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 20 to August 9.
Eva Strelinkova’s Stay Online is a Screenlife film that follows Katya (Yelyzaveta Zaitseva), a woman who is Continue reading Fantasia Festival 2023 Movie Reviews — Blackout, Stay Online and Vincent Must Die
Yuval Adler’s Sympathy for the Devil owes a great debt to Collateral. Michael Mann’s masterpiece bottles tension inside the cramped confines of a Los Angeles taxi cab. Devil substitutes Las Vegas for L.A. and the car of a man desperately trying to reach his wife giving birth in the hospital for a taxi driver. It also substitutes Jamie Foxx and Tom Cruise with Joel Kinnaman and Nicolas Cage.
Kinnaman takes on a similar—though less expressive and emotionally palpable—disposition to Foxx. Cage, on the other hand, replaces the icy composure of Cruise with his usual Continue reading Sympathy for the Devil (2023) Movie Review
As an amateur critic (who conjures a perception of credibility by the skin of his teeth like a snake oil salesman trucking across the unpaved west), I like to break down the calendar year by what it offers in terms of film. Summer comes with blockbuster season (more emphasis on the “busts” this year), but it also comes with genre fest season. In truth, there is very little reason to codify July through (roughly) October as the time for genre film festivals. Genre festivals run all over the world all throughout the year. But some of the most prominent fests fall in that stretch between Cannes and the lead-in to awards season. FrightFest, Fantastic Fest, Beyond Fest.
And the festival that kicks off this arbitrarily defined season is the Fantasia International Film Festival. Taking place in Montreal from July 20 to August 9, this year’s 27th edition of the fest features new, cutting edge genre films from across the globe, as well as a quality selection of older films. Here are, in no particular order, seven films from the program worth keeping an eye on.
Joe Lynch’s Suitable Flesh, a Lovecraft adaptation starring Heather Graham and Barbara Crampton, appears satisfyingly Continue reading Fantasia International Film Festival 2023 Lineup Preview
2023 is shaping up to be the year that giant Hollywood franchises try to tell us that they are too sprawling and layered and beholden to their fanbases for their own good. It’s like they are crying out for help.
Between Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse declaring the canon to be an existential threat to multiversal stability and The Flash gaudily colliding planets worth of continuity against one another (both examples are literal at the textual level), both Marvel and DC film properties can’t help but be gasping for breath under the massive weight of unbearable, multi-dimensional lore-making.
And yet, both Marvel and DC want to have their cakes and eat them, too, as they make laborious nods to the unwieldy Gordian knots of their own creation while also reveling in the synergistic team-ups and nesting doll-like allusions that made both franchises box office draws in the first place.
If it sounds like I’m being overly cynical, let me assure you I am Continue reading The Flash (2023) Movie Review
Before the release of this new Guardians of the Galaxy installment, I felt like Marvel had zombified me. Since the studio’s massive saga-ender Avengers: Endgame, I have continued going to the theater to see each new entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. None of these films have moved me in any sort of way. I simply show up, sit numb in the dirty theater seat, and then leave the film without any strong emotions whatsoever. Even Spider-Man: No Way Home, a film many enjoyed, left me strikingly cold. I simply no longer care about this multi-franchise empire.
However, something about James Gunn’s take on the Guardians works on me in a different way. Where Marvel’s phase four (are we on four? five?) felt like a series of films introducing or re-introducing characters without a meaningful sense of Continue reading Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023) Movie Review
Sandwiched between the releases of two massive Summer blockbusters, Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3 and Fast X, were a meager selection of smaller films. There’s the hypnosis crime thriller from Robert Rodriguez starring Ben Affleck. There’s the sequel to the quiet, soft hit Book Club. There’s also Sony’s shabby looking live-action anime adaptation Knights of the Zodiac.
Then, there’s BlackBerry. If any of these small and mid-budget movies are worth your time, it is BlackBerry. A tech entrepreneur biopic in the style of a classical tragedy, Matt Johnson’s film charts the rise and fall of Research in Motion (RIM), the startup that developed the BlackBerry. In particular, it zooms in on Continue reading BlackBerry (2023) Movie Review
My relationship with the John Wick films has been a turbulent one. My review for John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum revised my review of John Wick: Chapter Two. In re-watching the films in preparation for this new, epic-length chapter, I found my fondness for the first film waning. There is enjoyment to be had in all three films, and the stunt work in the first film was arguably a wake-up call to the rest of Hollywood to step up their action movie product.
But I have also found myself increasingly exhausted by the prolonged action sequences, flurries of bullets, and metric ton of broken glass. I had to question, then, what my response to an almost three-hour long fourth film in this franchise might be. My expectations were in flux. Parabellum is Continue reading John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023) Movie Review
This is installment six in our “Psychotronic Cinema” series. (What is psychotronic cinema?).
There exists a veritable subgenre of horror-thrillers (truly, there are dozens and dozens of these things) where the premise involves some form of gamified scenario centering around torturous or otherwise deadly scenarios. The trend blew up following the massive success of the Saw franchise (a franchise also responsible for popularizing the torture porn film), but it did not begin here. It also saw a recent unlikely revival with the surprise success of Squid Game in 2021.
Series 7: The Contenders is something like a working class, non-science fiction Running Man. Or a non-science fiction The Hunger Games, years before those books were published. It is murder codified into Continue reading Series 7: The Contenders (2001) is an Underseen Gem — Psychotronic Cinema
CineFiles Movie Reviews 