Fantastic Fest

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Fantastic Fest 2025: ‘Primate’ is a Slick, Animalistic, Horror Throwback

Primate is the latest film from Johannes Roberts, whose last movie was Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. As the festival kicked off, Fantastic Fest audiences gathered in a theater with various small cameras on tripods pointing toward the crowd. It was clear that Paramount was preparing to record the reactions of the movie-going audience. Right away, there was a strong

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Fantastic Fest 2025: 7 Highly Anticipated Films to Watch

Fantastic Fest 2025 kicks off today in Austin, Texas, with another year of potentially great offerings. The festival is jam-packed with several great titles and early premieres. For example, the highly anticipated sequel to Scott Derrickson’s The Black Phone is expected to captivate the Austin community during the first weekend. The festival will also feature Chris Stuckmann’s long-awaited movie debut, Shelby

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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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Humanity’s Survival and Prehistoric Horrors in ‘Out of Darkness’

One of the coolest compliments I ever heard the late, great Roger Ebert express about a movie was that, while you’re watching it, your mind keeps turning; the movie’s mysteries encourage you to explore your own imagination in regard to what you’re seeing on the screen. The new prehistoric horror film from Bleecker Street titled Out of Darkness is exactly the

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‘She is Conann’ Review: A Banksy-inspired Vision of Conan the Barbarian

She is Conann is not a Conan film. The characters are mostly here, including the addition of Red Sonja. But the acid dream of She is Conann has other ideas on its mind. In a weird, nightmarish feminine LGTBQ vision of the Barbarian. We see the iconic character through various stages of her life, bathing the brutal character’s journey in a tub of

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‘When Evil Lurks’ Review: A Whole Other Level of Fear

Horror, like any genre, is beholden to certain tropes. A well within the genre that’s been run into the ground is the possession sub-genre, to the point where trailers for a new Exorcist film are eliciting eye-rolls instead of the desired terror. Repetition of the same beats from possession films ad nauseam is to blame. To reinvigorate the possession movie, you

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