Fantasia 2025: 'Blazing Fists' Movie Review

Blazing Fists is a much more manageable title for prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike’s new film, which is also known as Blue Fight: The Breaking Down of Young Blue Warriors. That’s a mouthful. Whatever you call it, this is a fairly straightforward action drama about young men using sports, mixed martial arts in this case, to rise above meager circumstances. But don’t worry, this is still Miike, so it also has biker gangs, violence, oddball flourishes, and a sardonic crime boss bored with the world in a casual, terrifying way.

Fantasia 2025: 'Redux Redux' Movie Review

A woman stands in a desert in the darkening twilight, looming over a man, tied to a chair, burning to death at her feet. This is Irene Kelly (Michaela McManus). She’s travelling dimension to dimension, methodically killing every version of Neville (Jeremy Holm), the serial killer who murdered her daughter. It’s a hell of a first image to kick off Kevin and Matthew McManus’s (The Block Island Sound) indie sci-fi thriller Redux Redux.

'The A-Frame' (2024) Movie Review

If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. So goes the well-worn saying, so goes the story of Donna (Dana Namerode). A talented pianist, the diagnosis of an aggressive, highly localized cancer means the only way to save her life is to amputate her arm. As her days become a series of indifferent doctors and callous support groups, the prospect of losing everything she’s devoted her life to leads her to accept an offer from Sam (Johnny Whitworth, Empire Records), a mysterious (sketchy) scientist who claims he can cure her. What initially looks like an immediate, miraculous cure turns into something much more sinister. And occasionally quite gooey.

'Osiris' (2025) Movie Review

Coming off back-to-back bangers Shrapnel and The Channel, William Kaufman is back with more of that sweet DTV tactical action that’s so popular amongst a certain segment of moviegoers. This time, however, he’s splashing around in the genre pool with Osiris. It’s not his first foray into genre, Daylight’s End has vampires, after all, but this one involves aliens and spaceships and all the associated sci-fi accoutrements.

Fantasia 2025: 'The Serpent's Skin' Movie Review

When Anna (Alexandra McVicker), a young trans woman, leaves her shitty home town to start fresh, she learns you can run from your past, but you can’t get away from yourself, and finds plenty of new messes in the big city. Like vampires. 21-year-old filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay’s sixth feature, The Serpent’s Skin, uses this familiar premise as a jumping off point to do something a bit different.

Fantasia 2025: 'The Well' Movie Review

Working within specific, well-worn genre or subgenre frameworks can make it difficult to do something wholly new. How many rehashed slashers have we all sat through? But that doesn’t mean there aren’t worthwhile stories to tell. We still occasionally see exciting, fresh zombie tales, for instance. Post-apocalyptic movies are another example, illustrated nicely by The Well. Documentarian Hubert Davis (Black Ice), in his first narrative feature, uses these familiar trappings to tell a tense, brooding, slow-burn tale of life past the end of the world.

'Ghost Killer' (2024) Movie Review

Fumika (Akari Takaishi, Baby Assassins) is your average college student. She has a crappy job, constantly fends off creepy men pestering her, and she’s very clumsy. Seriously, she falls down. A lot. Things change a wee bit, however, when she meets the ghost of a vicious hitman, Kudo (Masanori Mimoto, First Love), who occasionally possesses her and takes control of her body. It’s like Upgrade or even Venom at times as the two consciousnesses occupy the same space. (Or All of Me with fisticuffs?) After some coaxing, she agrees to help him exact revenge against the people who killed him. So goes the plot of Kensuke Sonomura’s new action-oriented ghost story Ghost Killer. 

Fantasia 2025: 'Terrestrial' Movie Review

Three friends, Vic (Edy Modica), Maddie (Pauline Chalamet), and her fiancé Ryan (James Morosini), visit their college pal, Allen (Jermaine Fowler), now a hot up-and-coming science fiction writer. As Allen welcomes his old buddies to his epic new Los Angeles mansion, this reunion, while all smiles and hugs on the surface, hides a seething cauldron of sordid interpersonal histories, long-simmering rivalries, distrust, jealousy, and much more. Maybe Maddie is in love with Allen, why does Ryan pick apart every word Allen says, maybe Allen hasn’t even written a single word of his high-priced novel. And then things get out of hand.

Fantasia 2025: 10 Movies To See

It’s time once again for one of our favorite events of the year, Fantasia Fest, also known as the world’s largest genre film festival. Running from Wednesday, July 16 through Sunday, August 3, the schedule is, as always, bursting at the seams with all manner of horror, action, sci-fi, and other assorted cinematic goodness.

'Daniela Forever' (2024) Movie Review

Not everything that looks perfect truly is. That’s the underlying conceit of Daniela Forever, the latest genre-bender from Nacho Vigalondo (Colossal, Timecrimes). Quirky and off-kilter, which is particularly on-brand for the Spanish writer/director, this romance smudges the lines between drama and sci-fi, blending earnest yearning and self-delusion into a careful-what-you-wish-for smoothie of memory, flawed recollections and conceptions of people, and the chaotic nature of dream logic.

'K.O.' (2025) Movie Review

It makes too much sense to cast Ciryl Gane in an action movie. On one hand, he’s a professional MMA fighter, a heavyweight no less. At six-foot-five, he’s a 250 pound wall of muscly giant, with a unique blend of physicality and martial arts acumen to more than sell an on-screen fight. On the other hand, however, he also has an adorable baby face, complete with a goofy smile that often makes it difficult to take him seriously as a badass. It's hard to say this massive, scary dude is cute, but…he kind of is. Fortunately French director Antoine Blossier knows how to make good use of both of these facets in his new movie, K.O.