Lucid and Every Heavy Thing had their world premieres on July 21 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.
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
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
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
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
Hold the Fort had its world premiere on July 16 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.
Herbert Gruber (Mark Ashworth) sets down a box of “Shoot ‘Em Dead” shotgun shells and hands his wife Mable (Devney Nixon) a wooden stake. Herb insists that nothing could convince him to sell his family’s land. Over his dead body, and all that. “Nothing’s takin’ my land,” Herb says. Then, he arms himself for a night full of a cryptid sort of self-defense.
William Bagley’s Hold the Fort is a broad horror comedy centering on the new tenants of Gruber Hills. Following Herb apparently not making it through the night, the suburb has a new home for sale. Lucas (Chris Mayers) and Jenny (Haley Leary) arrive to the warm welcome of the HOA representative (Julian Smith), who informs them of the portal that annually sends through a bevy of Continue reading Review: Hold the Fort — Fantasia Festival 2025
2025. Another year, another Fantasia International Film Festival experience. Fantasia is a massive festival centering on international genre cinema. I love covering this Montreal fest. It’s selections are always diverse and offbeat, turning me on to pockets of the genre film space that I was not privy to. So let’s just get down to it. Five films in this year’s program (probably) worth adding to the watchlist. Let’s go.
This year’s Fantasia Festival runs from July 16 to August 3.
I have seen three Mickey Reece films courtesy of Fantasia Fest, and they were all intriguing formal experiments. His work feels like the natural progression of the mumblecore/mumblegore genre (i.e., it’s lo-fi and low-key, but moves past the self-seriousness and intentional lack of effort that caused mumblecore to taper off in the first place). His films aren’t Continue reading Fantasia Festival 2025 Lineup Preview
After nearly 30 years, the Mission: Impossible film franchise is finally (maybe) coming to an end. As a time capsule, it has tracked Hollywood’s A-list golden boy Tom Cruise through multiple eras of Hollywood blockbuster. In 1996, the town was dominated by movies led by actors who could “open.” That list of talent who can sell a movie on their star power alone has long since shrunk into (arguably) a single digit number.
Cruise has fought to remain on this dwindling list, largely hanging his hat on the franchise that allows him to tout death-defying stunts and globe-trotting exploits. The franchise has grown with his outsized ambition, bloating into epics of grandiose international espionage with ludicrous plots and lengthy (and often exquisitely choreographed) set pieces.
For those that enjoy the fare, the ballooning insanity of the franchise’s stunts (and runtimes) is not only accepted but encouraged. It is only expected, then, that Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie would fully embrace the Continue reading Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (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
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
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
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