Category Archives: Sci-Fi/Fantasy

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

Home Bodies — Fantasia Festival 2026 Movie Review

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Home Bodies is screening as part of the 2026 Fantasia International Film Festival.

In Home Bodies, directed by Casey Walker from a script by Marcus Sullivan and Adrian Murray, two children live alone in a small, two-story home that simply doesn’t look right. Dark, cavernous hallways have an industrial quality to their architecture. The appliances in the kitchen, or “food room,” as the kids call it, are out-dated, yet they produce hot food instantly. The children watch VHS tapes that re-run episodes of a single, low-budget children’s television show set on a farm. If things don’t read as peculiar by this point, the children speaking to a disembodied voice anthropomorphized in the form of a pulsing white light, a voice they refer to as “Father,” leaves no room for debate. These siblings are being held hostage in some sort of psychological experiment.

On premise, Home Bodies is very Twilight Zone slash Black Mirror adjacent. It has one central, fantastical sci-fi concept that it rides for 95 minutes. The answers to its questions Continue reading Home Bodies — Fantasia Festival 2026 Movie Review →

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

You Are the Film — Fantasia Festival 2026 Movie Review

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You Are the Film is screening as part of the 2026 Fantasia International Film Festival.

Madoka (Marika Ito) is going to see a film. It is not a popular title, and it is playing at a tiny theater attended by no one but herself. But it is a film shot locally, so she decides to give it a try. In the film, Kazuma (Kai Inowaki) is going to see a film. What he sees on that cinema screen is Madoka. Madoka is a playwright for a small theatre troupe, Kazuma is the frontman of a fledgling rock band that’s going nowhere. Their lives not only share similarities, but they are seemingly operating in direct parallel—a parallel they are able to physically see through the apparatus of the cinema screen. They see each other through the screen and can communicate to one another, and both want the other to leave the theater so something interesting can happen in their respective film.

Madoka, upset to hear from the synopsis of the “film” in which she is starring that some of her actors want to drop out of her new production, is the first to leave the auditorium. Kazuma watches as, Continue reading You Are the Film — Fantasia Festival 2026 Movie Review →

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

Project Hail Mary (2026) Movie Review

We’ve heard it all before. The isolated, industrious, possibly roguish single man left to his own devices in the depths of space. It’s a familiar tale. Author Andy Weir himself has already strung a similar yarn before this one, with the potato farming celestial castaway of The Martian (who would later be portrayed by Matt Damon in Ridley Scott’s 2015 adaptation). Project Hail Mary has a premise that shares a resemblance, but the end results are far different (and, I would argue, more compelling).

In this iteration, our stranded hero is Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a loner middle school science teacher whose controversial PhD dissertation and academic antics got him blacklisted from the scientific community. Luckily for Grace, his theory that water is not necessary for life lands him a spot on the global team that is working desperately to stop a mysterious molecular life form, dubbed Astrophage, from Continue reading Project Hail Mary (2026) Movie Review →

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

Review: Black Eyed Susan — Fantasia Festival 2024

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

Scooter McCrae could be described as an underground filmmaker. His three features have all been made on shoestring budgets and have provocatively challenged conventions. I remain a neophyte to McCrae’s work (I promise I will watch Sixteen Tongues very soon, but I didn’t have time to catch up with it ahead of this review). At the same time, I imagine I will see similar themes and moods to Black Eyed Susan present in his earlier films.

In the film, a man with a history of alcohol dependency and aggressive outbursts, Derek (Damien Maffei), is hired by an acquaintance to work at an artificial intelligence development company. The technology the company wants to push to market, and which Derek is tasked with testing, is a highly realistic Continue reading Review: Black Eyed Susan — 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 →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Drama, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024) Movie Review

Wes Ball’s The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes moves the world of the 2010s Apes trilogy multiple generations of apes into the future. Caeser (Andy Serkis) long deceased, the planet of the apes has mostly forgotten his impact on their world. Apes now live in clans, scattered around the ruins of human cities. One gorilla, who has adopted the name Caeser for himself, wants more than a clan. He desires an empire. Proximus Caeser (Kevin Durrand) violently destroys neighboring clans and brings the surviving apes into his kingdom.

This includes the “Eagle Clan” of which young Noa (Owen Teague) is a part. Noa witnesses the death of Continue reading Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire (2023) Movie Review

Zack Snyder’s latest is a two-part space opera epic with the classic rebels-versus-empire dynamic popularized in the cinema mainstream by Star Wars (the film began its life as a Star Wars film pitched to Disney). This dynamic is purposefully simplistic, with basic white hat heroes and black hat villains. The issue with Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire is that these characters are not only simplistically drawn, but they are never particularly compelling figures to begin with.

The first sign that this script has character issues is an emotional monologue given by Sofia Boutella’s Kora. She speaks of being unable to Continue reading Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire (2023) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words), musical, Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Wonka (2023) Movie Review

There is something both unnecessary yet totally fitting about the new musical prequel to the 1971 film Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (itself an adaptation of the Roald Dahl book of a slightly different name). It makes sense, in that director Paul King received much acclaim for his adaptation of another beloved children’s literature property in Paddington. It is unnecessary in the same way that any modern-day IP reboot has to justify itself beyond the motivation of cashing in. Wonka is far less lazy than most of these reboot efforts, but it also never shakes the sense of being inessential.

The film’s opening number does a clever job of establishing the basic premise (in short, consumer capitalism suppresses true entrepreneurial spirit and creative innovation for the sake of monopolistic stability and commodity homogenization). It is also Continue reading Wonka (2023) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Drama, Leave it, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Fantasia Festival 2023 Movie Reviews — River, Femme, #Manhole

River, #Manhole and Femme are screening as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 20 to August 9.

River

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 →

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

Fantasia Festival 2023 Movie Reviews — Hundreds of Beavers, Aporia, Emptiness

Aporia, Hundreds of Beavers, and Emptiness are screening as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 20 to August 9.

Aporia

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 →