Category Archives: Like It

Movies I liked but likely won’t watch again. Something was off that I wish had been done differently.

All Movie Reviews, Drama, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Review: Lurker — Fantasia Festival 2025

Lurker had its Canadian premiere on Aug 1 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Alex Russell’s debut film Lurker is about obsession. It is in one sense about the parasocial relationships fostered by celebrity, but more accurately it is about the mind of a person who manipulates the world around him in order to embed himself within one celebrity’s orbit. It is a film about a sociopath, essentially.

Matthew (Theodore Pellerin), this sociopathic personality, works at a clothing store occasionally patroned by an up-and-coming musician named Oliver (Archie Madekwe). Matthew plays a song over the speaker that is calculated to get Oliver’s attention. When he gets it, he pretends to have never heard of Oliver’s music. He, of course, has heard it. In fact, he relentlessly stalks Oliver’s social media to gain Continue reading Review: Lurker — Fantasia Festival 2025 →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Drama, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Review: OBEX — Fantasia Festival 2025

OBEX had its Canadian premiere on July 29 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

It’s 1987. “Computer” Conor (Albert Birney, who also directs) spends his morning talking lovingly to his dog Sandy and watching the news on one of the three television sets stacked in a row in the middle of his living room. He works from home, rapidly typing out on his Macintosh computer digital recreations of photographs that people send to him. His neighbor Mary (Callie Hernandez) arrives weekly to check up on him and bring him groceries, but he never opens the door.

While thumbing through a computer hobbyist catalogue, Conor stumbles upon a mysterious ad for a video game called “OBEX.” Not only is it a game, but it is Continue reading Review: OBEX — Fantasia Festival 2025 →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Drama, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Fantasia Festival 2025 Reviews — Lucid and Every Heavy Thing

Lucid and Every Heavy Thing had their world premieres on July 21 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Lucid

Mia (Caitlin Taylor) is an art student without inspiration. When she screws up her self-portrait, she nails a dead fish to it at the last minute and hurries to the studio. Her instructor and most of her classmates are unimpressed. Desperate for Continue reading Fantasia Festival 2025 Reviews — Lucid and Every Heavy Thing →

All Movie Reviews, Horror, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Review: Hellcat — Fantasia Festival 2025

Hellcat had its world premiere on July 25 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Brock Bodell’s Hellcat is immediately intense. A rickety mobile home tearing down the highway is our setting. Inside is Lena (Dakota Gorman), who wakes to the jolting movements of the vehicle the home is hitched to. Assessing her situation, she finds herself padlocked inside with nothing in her pockets. A voice over an intercom (Todd Terry) tells her that she is “infected” (in a nice touch, the voice comes through the mouth of a taxidermy wolf head). This driver, Clive, claims to have found her injured, and that he is driving her to a doctor. But the red flags quickly start to mount as Lena investigates the trailer.

My immediate thought on being presented the premise is that the title of the film was likely giving the twist away, or that the title was a red herring. In either case, I would have preferred the lack of clarity that the film dropped me into. There is enough ambiguity to what is going on—until Continue reading Review: Hellcat — Fantasia Festival 2025 →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Romance

Review: I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn — Fantasia Festival 2025

I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn had its world premiere on July 23 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Shina Mizuhara (Ui Mihara) is a bored actress. Promoting her new film, she lazily answers softball press questions. When she doesn’t get anything satisfying out of the interview, she turns to the camera and starts drooling. Completely unmotivated, Shina strives for a change of pace by vacationing in New York City.

Jack (Estevan Munoz) is an imaginative and passionate wannabe filmmaker. Growing up on Nirvana, George Romero, and Takashi Miike, Jack wants nothing more than to bring a punk rock ethos to film. Instead, he is a lowly intern for a New York studio, slaving away while only getting slightly closer to his dream.

When Shina and Jack get drunk at the same dive bar (and Jack finds Shina outside lying in someone else’s puke), an unlikely Continue reading Review: I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn — Fantasia Festival 2025 →

All Movie Reviews, Animation, Horror, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Review: Dog of God — Fantasia Festival 2025

Dog of God had its world premiere on July 21 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Dog of God is the type of film that begins with the triumphant, heavy metal castration of a giant demon. You’re probably familiar with the type. Those Latvian rotoscope animations with heightened folkloric subject matter and a bawdy, crass sense of humor. There’s got to be hundreds of them out there.

In all sincerity, Lauris and Raitis Ābele’s Dog of God is quite unlike any other animated feature out there. It has the grimy ambitions of a Heavy Metal, a Ralph Bakshi film, or, more recently, a Mad God. But its mix of period fantasy and visual psychedelia (and its oddly high sex drive) make for Continue reading Review: Dog of God — Fantasia Festival 2025 →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Friendship (2025) Movie Review

It has become increasingly common since the COVID-19 pandemic for stories, think pieces, podcast episodes, TikTok clips, studies, surveys, and all manner of media detritus to be made on the current state of adult friendship and an apparent “loneliness epidemic.” Why are people feeling so lonely, more so now than ever before?

Despite how it’s been characterized, this “epidemic” is not a novel phenomenon unique to one generation or isolated to a “post-pandemic” moment in time. It’s a decades old trend in declining social connection, according to former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. Still, the discourse surrounding this supposed epidemic comes with the usual nervy energy of Internet-brained discussion: if this is a crisis, then it must have a solution, and its causes must be easily condensed into digestible bullet points.

This reduction of the complexities of human relationships into basic cause-effect bullet points (we are more lonely…because technology!) is a useful entry point into Continue reading Friendship (2025) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Horror, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025) Movie Review

After spending time revisiting all of the Final Destination films, I found the long wet cement of my opinions on the franchise finally hardening. Until now, I wasn’t quite certain on the merits of the horror series in which the unseen force of Death gleefully slaughters special individuals who at first escape Death’s grasp. There is something fun about the premise, and in discrete moments this sense of fun comes to the fore. But often, these films are fairly mild in terms of horror and fail to nail the comedy tone that I think is necessary for these film to work at all.

Final Destination: Bloodlines, thankfully, fully understands the assignment. There are moments that lean towards serious drama, but in the main this film makes Continue reading Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Horror, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Final Destination 5 (2011) Movie Review

After a two-day marathon of all Final Destination films, what have I learned? That this franchise is as middling as I remembered it being. On the other hand, the downward trajectory that I remember this series having wasn’t exactly the case. I believe three is better than the first two, if only marginally. And four is one of the worst studio horror films out there. Then there’s five. I remembered Final Destination 5 being fairly bad, even as it leans more heavily into the humor (which I find a better option in the case of this series than going in the other direction). Perhaps I was a bit wrong.

The long opening sequence of Final Destination 5 does not look particularly good. Every about-to-be cadaver looks like a hunk of plastic moments before being sliced, diced, and pitched off the suspension bridge. But it is relatively exciting when compared to Continue reading Final Destination 5 (2011) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Horror, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Final Destination 3 (2006) Movie Review

James Wong and Glen Morgan returned to the Final Destination franchise with the third installment, which some consider the high mark of the series. Final Destination 3 replicated, almost to the exact number, the box office performance of the first film ($54 million domestic, $112 worldwide). Narratively speaking, though, it is the first film in the series to consciously break from the characters and events of that initial film.

The opening premonition sequence stands out as one of the best the series has to offer. I personally still prefer the highway pileup in Final Destination 2 for its visual cohesion, but for the frenetic pacing of the rollercoaster disaster, Wong does succeed in making the action mostly clear and suspenseful. The scene plays out as all the others do: One person sees a strangely detailed vision of a horrific accident that kills dozens, then comes to and causes a massive scene. A few people get pulled away from the site of the oncoming accident as a result, setting the stage for the specter of Death to come and right the cosmic scales.

Inexplicably, a character who survives the rollercoaster discovers the crashed plane and the entire plot of Final Destination, so that the characters can get an easy jumpstart on understanding what is happening to them. The attempt for these sequels to Continue reading Final Destination 3 (2006) Movie Review →