Category Archives: All Movie Reviews

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

Review: FAQ — Fantasia Festival 2024

FAQ is screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.

FAQ is an interesting little creature. It has an infectious personality, driven by the child actor at its center. For a small-scale story about childhood and parenting, it is doing quite a lot (perhaps too much). Even as it is unclear exactly where it is going, what its odd plot points are progressing toward, the film gets by on heart and charm and liveliness.

At its core, FAQ is a film about a daughter and a mother. Dong-chun (Park Na-eun) is a quiet, curious, and restless child who, despite an excelling mind, struggles to make sense of her studies. Her mother (Park Hyo-ju) is worried about Continue reading Review: FAQ — Fantasia Festival 2024 →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Review: The Old Man and the Demon Sword — Fantasia Festival 2024

The Old Man and the Demon Sword is screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.

Despite being extremely talky with heavily expository dialogue, the plot of Fábio Powers’ The Old Man and the Demon Sword is immediately confusing. Something meant to resemble a force field is cut through by a swordsman and his demon-possessed sword, initiating a battle against skeletal shadow people that no one else can see (save for the random older man of the title, who pops out of the bushes with a knife). The sword wants the barrier to be breached, for reasons I could not quite identify. And some sort of grand council is pulling the strings of the skeleton army, it seems.

The hooded hero has what is meant to be witty banter with the demon sword (João Loy), a trait carried over to the old man Tonho (Antonio da Luz) once he acquires the sword. The film, ostensibly, is an Continue reading Review: The Old Man and the Demon Sword — Fantasia Festival 2024 →

All Movie Reviews, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Review: Animalia Paradoxa — Fantasia Festival 2024

Animalia Paradoxa is screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.

I spent a good majority of Animalia Paradoxa trying to simultaneously parse the text and subtext of the film. The two must share some sort of relationship, I thought, yet mentally circling one made the other seem more obscured.

The text of the film involves, among other unexplainable practices that flirt with avant-garde, a post-apocalyptic world in which Continue reading Review: Animalia Paradoxa — Fantasia Festival 2024 →

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

Review: Vulcanizadora — Fantasia Festival 2024

Vulcanizadora is screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.

Joel Potrykus has made a career out of making independent films about ostracized, lonely, deadbeat men in their thirties with no direction and no motivation. His Relaxer, for example, chooses as its focus an unemployed man who allows his brother to torture him with “challenges” which begin with him vomiting a gallon of milk and culminate in him sitting on a couch playing Pac-Man in his own filth for (seemingly) months.

What happens when Potrykus turns his attention on those types of men as they pass into middle age? Vulcanizadora, his latest, sees Potrykus and his frequent collaborator Joshua Burge reprise roles they played in Continue reading Review: Vulcanizadora — Fantasia Festival 2024 →

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

Kill (2024) Movie Review

Kill lives up to its title, and then some. In many regards, the hyperviolent “vengeance is a dish best served ice cold” action film sells itself short by not calling itself Overkill.

This said, it takes a while to get to this level of breathless brutality. With great intentionality, Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s film takes 45 minutes or so to establish a Continue reading Kill (2024) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Horror, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

The Watchers (2024) Movie Review

For a first-time filmmaker, Ishana Night Shyamalan shows promise with The Watchers. Her debut, a folklore-infused horror mystery based on a novel by A.M. Shine, suffers more from its source material than from the creator behind the camera. On her way to deliver a bird to a zoo in Belfast, Mina (Dakota Fanning) finds herself stranded in a forest. She abandons her broken-down car and searches for help, only to find herself trapped in the labyrinthine rows of trees.

This forest is home to a mysterious presence, creatures that come out at night. Mina is told of this by a woman named Madeline (Olwen Fouere), who brings her to a strange, Continue reading The Watchers (2024) Movie Review →

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

In a Violent Nature (2024) Movie Review

You could describe In a Violent Nature in many ways. It’s like a modern reboot of Friday the 13th that tells the majority of the story from Jason Voorhees’s point of view. In spurts, it’s like Terrifier 2 for A24 nerds. It is, perhaps, an anti-slasher post-horror anti-post-horror slasher. It is like a parody of the slasher film inside a parody of so-called “elevated horror.”

In the woods of Ontario, a group of young people on holiday stumble upon an abandoned fire tower. One of them picks up a curious locket and takes it with him. This locket, like a mythic totem, was the only thing allowing an undead killer named Johnny to rest peacefully in the ground. Given to him by his mother, the locket means a lot to Johnny (presumably; Johnny never speaks). The balance disturbed, Johnny is unearthed and begins stalking the woods in search of this family heirloom.

Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature employs the conventions of post-horror as a deadpan delivery mechanism for 1980s-style slasher schlock. Moments of brutality in this film feel like Continue reading In a Violent Nature (2024) Movie Review →

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

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) Movie Review

George Miller’s Furiosa is a prequel to his acclaimed fourth Mad Max film, Fury Road. It tells the story of how Furiosa (portrayed by Charlize Theron in Fury Road and Anya Taylor-Joy here) found herself in the employ of the despotic leader of the Citadel, Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme, who is only slightly less menacing than Fury Road’s Hugh Keays-Byrne).

Beyond being one of those prequels that merely traces the line back to the start, Furiosa also spends much of its runtime fleshing out the world of the Mad Max Wasteland and the three tenuously symbiotic settlements that keep life there from snuffing out. The combination of these two threads – the personal story of Furiosa and the grander narrative of human survival – make for a film that weaves vengeance and history-making into an epic yarn.

As one character describes of Furiosa, there is “a purposeful savagery” to both the film and its world. Miller takes pains to make the Wasteland appear Continue reading Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) Movie Review →

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

I Saw the TV Glow (2024) Movie Review

You suffocate, then you learn how to breathe again.

Jane Schoenbrun’s magnificent I Saw the TV Glow is a suburban-set semi-hallucinatory, semi-body horror piece of magical realism. Yet the film feels definitively lucid, articulating with striking poise a story about fluid identity and the repressive external forces that work to render that fluidity categorical. It is also a film whose body horror elements (which are quite minimal to the eyes of a frequent horror viewer) should not scare away the squeamish. Indeed, much of the horror regarding the body involves deeply conflicted and isolating internal states, as opposed to buckets of blood.

As for the magical realism, it is the icing on this hazy, flickering cake. Aided by an effectively moody soundtrack and some evocative imagery, Schoenbrun produces a film that feels Continue reading I Saw the TV Glow (2024) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Drama, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

IF (2024) Movie Review

John Krasinski’s IF is something of an imaginary creature in today’s cinema landscape. Paramount’s aspirant blockbuster is a full-on big budget children’s film with no attachment to established intellectual property. Compare this to essentially every other family offering coming up this summer: Despicable Me 4, The Garfield Movie, Inside Out 2, Harold and the Purple Crayon. The big purple elephant in the room is the weird imaginary friend movie that is a big studio risk in desperate search for an audience. This audience, one imagines, is families. The kids come for the colorful creatures that are wholly unrecognizable to them, and the parents stay for…potentially life threatening heart surgery?

The shame is that the diverse array of computer-generated imaginary things (they prefer to be called “ifs” for whatever reason) are mostly great visual effects, and they also are occasionally characters with personality. The potential for this to be Continue reading IF (2024) Movie Review →