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!
Before 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
Read MoreFor the past three years, it’s been a privilege for this writer to cover Fantasia Fest for a different outlet. Debatably, the previous home of the coverage did not match as well as it does for The Cosmic Circus. Here, weirdness, the fantastical, the bizarre, and sometimes the horrific are embraced by our readers. Fantasia Fest 2024 has all of these
Read More‘The Fall Guy’ is a stunt-filled, romantic, and funny movie that celebrates the industry while giving the masses a fun time.
Read MoreI’m getting to that age where I look at the opportunities teenagers have today and think old person thoughts about what I missed out on as a kid simply because it didn’t exist yet. There’s an entire film program at a local high school where I live that invited me to be a guest judge for their annual film festival last
Read MoreRemember when, in the depths of COVID lockdowns and isolation, we all became obsessed with a new Groundhog Day-style time loop movie called Palm Springs? It might seem like it happened two decades ago, but the movie, starring Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti, appeared on Hulu in the summer of 2020, and we were all instantly talking about it. Omni Loop,
Read MoreThere’s a good short film hiding somewhere inside Matthew Arnold and Freddie Wong’s grief-tinged sci-fi feature film debut, We’re All Gonna Die. A story that could have been told beautifully in about 45 minutes, maybe even leaving you wanting a little more, is instead stretched to beyond its limits in the feature version, dragging on for almost two full hours. [Warning:
Read MoreIf anyone ever complains to you that there’s nothing new under the sun in the world of cinema, please kindly point them to the documentary Grand Theft Hamlet. This experiment from British co-directors (and romantic partners) Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane covers the gamut of human emotion, from triumph to tragedy, in its 89 minutes of infectious fun. The story behind
Read More“Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” That quote, coined in the late 19th century by English historian and politician Lord Acton, would serve as a perfect tagline for the upcoming three-part HBO docuseries Ren Faire by director Lance Oppenheim. The first hour of the limited series, what Oppenheim describes as a “docu-fantasia,” premiered at SXSW 2024 and will turn up on
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