River, #Manhole and Femme are screening as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 20 to August 9.
Junta Yamaguchi’s Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes was a delightfully quirky experiment with time travel tropes. The film was rough and tumble from a visual standpoint, but its charm withstood its Continue reading Fantasia Festival 2023 Movie Reviews — River, Femme, #Manhole
Sometimes I Think About Dying and Hippo are screening as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 20 to August 9.
Fran (Daisy Ridley) leaves her office job each day, microwaves herself a dinner, and sits alone on her couch. Occasionally, during these quiet moments, she does what the film’s title suggests, roving through fantasies of death in her mind. Then she returns to Continue reading Fantasia Festival 2023 Movie Reviews — Sometimes I Think About Dying, Hippo
Satan Wants You and Devils are screening as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 20 to August 9.
Kim Jae-hoon’s Devils is a crime thriller with a premise similar to that of a body swap movie. Police detective Jae-hwan (Oh Dae-hwan) disappears for a month after pursuing a sadistic serial killer (Jang Dong-yoon), only for both the cop and the killer to resurface unexpectedly. Jae-hwan wakes in a hospital to find himself Continue reading Fantasia Festival 2023 Movie Reviews — Satan Wants You, Devils
Aporia, Hundreds of Beavers, and Emptiness are screening as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 20 to August 9.
A year after Sophie’s (Judy Greer) husband dies, her daughter remains despondent. She is truant from school, failing classes, and she wants nothing to do with her friends or mother. When her late husband’s best friend (Payman Maadi) shows her a time machine he’s been building, Sophie decides to Continue reading Fantasia Festival 2023 Movie Reviews — Hundreds of Beavers, Aporia, Emptiness
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
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
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