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
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
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 MoreChoi Dong-hoon reinvents the language of time travel cinema through his Alienoid series. With its sequel, Alienoid: Return to the Future, now in theaters, the director takes even bigger storytelling, and aesthetic, risks to enthrall viewers. “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.” is the core tenet Christopher Nolan attempted to introduce its audiences within his time-travel sci-fi drama Tenet. But
Read MoreAmidst the post-war rubble and lingering trauma of nuclear destruction still present today in the world, Godzilla Minus One emerges as a blockbuster befitting a franchise that, like society, has transformed over the past 70 years. It continues breathing new life into kaiju stories. Still, instead of rehashing the political satire of 2016’s Shin Godzilla, it returns to the story’s roots, where Godzilla first emerged from
Read MoreWith Godzilla: Minus One making its way to movie theatres very soon and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters releasing on AppleTV+, I embarked on a rather ambitious project in preparation: watch every live-action Godzilla movie produced by Toho and rank them from worst to best. Before this project, I had already seen Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi’s Shin Godzilla alongside the animated
Read MoreThe Cosmic Circus is happy to announce we will be in attendance at this year’s Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. Last year, Fantastic Fest brought a lot of surprise offerings that went on to be massive hits and even Oscar contenders. Smile opened the festivities in 2022 and became an enormous success. The Banshees of Inisherin made the rounds during Oscar
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