Film Festivals

Our film festival coverage over the years has included Sundance, Fantasia Fest, Fantastic Fest, TIFF and more! Find many movie reviews and insights into visiting these festivals below!


 

Film FestivalsGuidesWhat to Expect

Sundance Film Festival 2025: 12 Highly Anticipated Films

The Cosmic Circus is thrilled to launch its first official year of covering the Sundance Film Festival. Our first piece highlights films that attendees and readers should possibly consider while exploring the festival. Last year continued the festival’s long history of bringing films that ignite conversation and acclaim. For instance, Sundance 2024 sparked mixed reactions to the ambitious AI romance Love

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Fantastic Fest 2024: Interview with ‘U Are The Universe’ Writer-Director Pavlo Ostrikov

As part of Fantastic Fest, I had the special opportunity to preview the new Ukrainian science fiction film U Are the Universe and I absolutely loved it, quickly becoming one of my favorite movies of the year. After the film, I had the privilege to interview writer-director Pavlo Ostrikov and we had a great conversation. Watch below as we dive into the

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Fantastic Fest 2024: ‘The Wild Robot’ and ‘Will & Harper’ Reviews

We continue our Fantastic Fest coverage with two of the most heartfelt experiences of the entire festival. Both have beautiful messages and were crafted with such love and care. The first is Dreamworks Animation’s latest effort, The Wild Robot, which sees the filmmaker behind How to Train Your Dragon tackle a new experience about parenting and raising children through the eyes

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Fantastic Fest 2024 Movie Reviews: ‘Anora’ and ‘Saturday Night’

Fantastic Fest 2024 is well underway and I had a chance to catch two more films screening there, Sean Baker’s Anora and Saturday Night, based on the beginnings of Saturday Night Live. Check out what I thought below! Anora: A slice of life film with a powerful message The Florida project is one of the best slice-of-life pictures in a long

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Fantastic Fest 2024 Movie Review: ‘The Rule of Jenny Pen’

Fantastic Fest 2024 kicked off with a bang yesterday. Many titles were at the festival, including The Rule of Jenny Pen, Never Let Go, and an acid trip of a concert with a weird fast-food-inspired band called Mac Sabbath. The festival also gave horror fans a debut for the latest sequel, Terrifier 3. We were able to catch all of these

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Fantasia Fest 2024 Review: ‘The Beast Within’, A Gothic Tale of Childhood Trauma

Fantasia Fest brought an unusual horror movie that touches on childhood trauma. The Beast Within brings back the old-school flavor of Hammer monster movies, where everything has a Gothic sensibility and an evocative story. The Beast Within deals with the confusion of growing up in a toxic environment. More specifically, how the brain attempts to cope with said environments; being young,

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Fantasia Fest 2024 Review: ‘Baby Assassins: Nice Days’ Is One of the Best Action Movies Ever Made

No 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

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Fantasia Fest 2024 Review: Exciting Action Doesn’t Quite Save ‘Out of the Shadow’

Competing 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

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Fantasia Fest 2024 Review: ‘Tatsumi’ is an Unimpressive Mob Thriller

With 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,

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