Tag Archives: 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 →

Horror, Lists, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

2024 Fantasia Film Festival Program Preview

It’s time again for the Fantasia International Film Festival. I really enjoy writing about the Montreal-based festival, whose films span multiple genres and celebrate the diversity that the term “genre film” has to offer. As per usual, I want to outline a few titles of interest being featured at this year’s festival.

Fantasia will hold its 28th edition from July 18 to August 4.

Frankie Freako (dir. Steven Kostanski)

Steven Kostanski’s Psycho Goreman was a clever play on a children’s fantasy film (not a children’s film, to be clear). The genre riffs Kostanski has been involved in have Continue reading 2024 Fantasia Film Festival Program Preview →

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 →

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

Abigail (2024) Movie Review

The team of directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and screenwriter Guy Busick have been well-discussed on this site. I have, in general, enjoyed their recent output – Scream VI notwithstanding. Their latest, Abigail (based on a story by Stephen Shields, who also gets a shared writing credit), has a similar generic blend to 2019’s Ready or Not. The latter film, a violent and comedic Most Dangerous Game send-up taking place almost entirely at one lavish estate, was a good bit of morbid fun. Abigail, an even more violent comedy horror film taking place almost entirely at one lavish estate, is similarly good for a light bit of morbid fun.

The film has two distinct halves. In the first, a group of criminals hired to Continue reading Abigail (2024) Movie Review →

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 →