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.

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.

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.

'Cuckoo' (2024) Movie Review

Birds sure are creepy little fuckers, aren’t they? Dinosaur-looking sons of bitches. At least that’s what Cuckoo would have you believe. Though Luz writer/director Tilman Singer’s latest off-kilter horror offering definitely keeps you guessing as to the why of the lingering avian motif, it ultimately pays off in wild ways, taking unusual paths to get there.

'Bookworm' (2024) Movie Review

Do people still like movies where Elijah Wood walks around the New Zealand wilderness? Because there’s a great deal of that in Bookworm, the latest directorial effort from Ant Timpson (Come to Daddy). It may not be quite as epic as the Lord of the Rings movies, but it’s impossible for that landscape to not look incredible, and there’s plenty of adventure on this sweet, earnest journey of reconciliation between a long-estranged father and daughter, a journey that also happens to be something of a cryptid hunt.

'Chainsaws Were Singing' (2024) Movie Review

When you hear about a DIY Estonian horror-musical that took the filmmaker (Sander Maran served as director, writer, editor, cinematographer, songwriter, and probably more roles) a decade to make, you can’t help but be curious. And Chainsaws Were Singing is all of that and so, so much more. This is a bizarre, wild time that goes way, way out in the wilderness and is something fans of movies like Cannibals: The Musical and Hundreds of Beavers need to check out.

'Carnage For Christmas' (2024) Movie Review

19-year-old Australian dynamo Alice Maio Mackay already has a hell of a roster of low-to-no-budget horror movies under her belt with the likes of T-Blockers, So Vam, and Bad Girl Boogey, among others. And now she’s back to throw her hat in the holiday horror ring with Carnage for Christmas, a bloody fun yuletide romp that’s definitely going into my regular seasonal rotation. 

Fantasia 2024: 10 Movies To See

Well, it’s that time again, time for the Fantasia Film Festival in ye olde Montreal. That’s in Canada for the geographically challenged. It runs from July 18 through August 4.

'Blackout' Movie Review

After messing with vampires and Frankenstein, in Habit and Depraved respectively, indie horror fave Larry Fessenden returns with his take on werewolves in Blackout. Set in a small town in upstate New York, painter Charley Barrett (Alex Hurt, son of William Hurt, which comes into play in one uniquely pointed way) makes his way through his last day in town, wrapping up loose ends, visiting friends one final time, and trying to right a few lingering wrongs on the way out the door. Complicating his exit, it turns out Charley is a werewolf and responsible for a number of recent deaths the elder powerbroker of this minor hamlet, Hammond (Marshall Bell), has chosen to blame on Miguel (Rigo Garay) despite a lack of evidence.

'Restore Point' (2023) Movie Review

What if you could save your life at a certain point and, if you die unexpectedly, can then reset to that moment, like a video game? That’s the general idea of director Robert Hloz’s Restore Point, a slice of dystopian sci-fi. A solid, sturdy neo-noir, the film combines a twisting mystery and cool world building with an intriguing idea that plays something like Chinatown by way of Minority Report, both thematically and aesthetically. 

'New Life' (2023) Movie Review

A young woman, frantic and covered in blood, flees unknown pursuers. An older woman, a fixer with an as-yet-undefined degenerative condition, is tasked with tracking her down and stopping her from crossing the border. So begins writer/director John Rosman’s taut horror-thriller New Life.

'Devils' Movie Review

The easiest, most obvious comparison point for director Kim Jae-hoon’s Devils is John Woo’s 1997 Face/Off. While not an exact one-to-one correlation, the two are similar enough that it’s definitely worth a mention and provides a good idea of what to expect. Both revolve around a cop and a serial killer who swap bodies and the ensuing game of cat-and-mouse, though Kim’s film works more in thriller territory than Woo’s bonkers action realm. None of this is meant to be dismissive, and though they walk similar lines, Devils does enough by the end to differentiate itself and make excellent an intriguing use of its core concept.

'Sympathy For The Devil' (2023) Movie Review

It’s hard to make a movie about two people alone in a car compelling. It’s been done, but unfortunately for Sympathy for the Devil, that’s not one of the film’s strong suits. Even Nicolas Cage fully let off the leash to riff and ramble and devour scenery and rant about the Mucous Man sprinkling boogers into his childhood nose isn’t enough to make this interesting or save an otherwise tepid, humdrum thriller.

Fantasia 2023: 10 Films To Check Out

Wait, it’s been a year already? I guess that’s what happens when time loses all meaning. The good news, however, is that since a year has passed it’s already time for the 2023 installment of the Fantasia Film Festival in ye olde Montreal.

'Dark Glasses' (2022) Movie Review

With Dark Glasses, his first film since 2012’s Dracula 3D, horror legend Dario Argento wants to remind you that, even at 81, he can still make a Dario Argento movie. Most, or at least many of his cinematic trademarks are present and accounted for. We’ve got striking colors, an unseen killer terrorizing young women, and a Goblin-esque score that could be lifted from one of the director’s late-70s/early-80s works, among other touches. While it doesn’t reach the highs of his more iconic films, it’s quick and efficient, fits solidly in his wheelhouse, and certainly rates higher than much of his recent output.

'Glorious' (2022) Movie Review

If you’ve spent any time on the road, you probably know highway rest stops can get weird. Sometimes very weird. What director Rebekah McKendry’s (All the Creatures Were Stirring) new movie Glorious supposes is, what if, instead of a weird rando on the other side of that roadside glory hole, it was something much darker, more sinister, and exponentially more powerful?