Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson’s film Rumours is very telling of what I like about cinema. Everything I love about the art form is found in this picture: experimentation with an ever-changing aesthetic, satirical jokes that take zero prisoners, and a slight jab at the audience for sitting through a movie that does not reward or fulfill them in
Read MoreAfter many years of bathing in the most egregious clichés and emotional trappings, the romantic drama desperately needs reinvention. Look no further than director John Crowley, who made a potential solution to a decaying genre with We Live in Time, a clichéd romantic story told in a scattershot, non-linear narrative. Its structure is highly communicative, too, juxtaposing moments of high-spirited joy
Read MoreThe opening scene for Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux signals a stark shift in tone from the 2019 Oscar and Golden Lion-winning first installment. With a Looney Tunes-inspired short directed by The Triplets of Belleville’s Sylvain Chomet, the movie posits itself as a lighter, more humorous affair than the punishing first movie. The animation is fairly creative, paying tribute to
Read MoreIt’s incredible how much my opinion of M. Night Shyamalan shifted almost overnight after sitting in front of his 2019 masterpiece, Glass. Before, I thought the same thing as everyone else: great first few movies, but his current output has been lacking. I’m not ready to say that The Last Airbender and After Earth are masterpieces, far from it. However, something
Read MoreNo hyperbole. You read this correctly. Yugo Sakamoto has pulled off one of the greatest action movies my eyes have ever witnessed in Baby Assassins: Nice Days, which had its Canadian premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival. The sequel to Baby Assassins 2, which vastly improved upon the 2022 microbudget first installment that had two amazing action sequences and not
Read MoreCompeting for the Cheval Noir Award at the Fantasia International Film Festival, Ricky Ko’s Out of the Shadow has all the right ingredients for a fun time at the movies: a coming-of-age tale for a teenaged protagonist who learns to trust herself through fighting, intricately staged and choreographed Karate battles, and religious symbolism that will guide the journey each protagonist will
Read MoreWith the Fantasia International Festival well underway, there are plenty of movies to still enjoy and appreciate in the Hall and J.A. de Sève auditoriums at Concordia University. A movie that sounded interesting on paper to me was Hiroshi Shoji’s Tatsumi, a mob drama that centers on its titular character (Yuya Endo) seeking revenge on the people who murdered his ex-girlfriend,
Read MoreBefore Shinji Araki’s Penalty Loop played in front of a sold-out crowd at the Fantasia International Film Festival, audiences were treated to the classic advertisement for Nongshim noodles not once but twice. At first, I didn’t grasp why this happened (although the real ones know the ad played an endless number of times in front of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy last year).
Read MoreThe first thing that usually jolts the first-time Fantasia International Film Festival visitors are the elusive meows that are heard in front of every screening after the head technician says, “Et maintenant…que le film commence!” (“And now… may the film begin!”). As he dims the lights of the Hall Auditorium, the audience begins to meow and sometimes make even weirder cat
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