Fantastic Fest Journal: The Wind
Emma Tammi’s The Wind is based on terrifying true stories. Back in the Old West, “prairie madness” would actually drive people mad. From the isolation to the unfamiliar surroundings, just about everything involve...
Emma Tammi’s The Wind is based on terrifying true stories. Back in the Old West, “prairie madness” would actually drive people mad. From the isolation to the unfamiliar surroundings, just about everything involve...
A gentle drama about a hapless art dealer looking to make one last score before retirement, Finnish filmmaker Klaus Härö’s One Last Deal provides a satisfying if not exceptional melodrama about aging, paintings, and the thri...
Mouthpiece finds veteran Canadian filmmaker Patricia Rozema at the top of her game. It’s an emotionally rich and stylistically assured drama that traces one young woman’s coming to terms with the death of her mother.
With the recent explosion of Mandy on social media and the big screen, the cult of Nic Cage has been given new life. With these “Rage Cage” flicks, it just makes sense to give the actor a character and a rough plot, an...
Freaks is a highly allegorical tale that combines comic book fantasy, sci-fi tropes, and political metaphor that vacillate between being effective and messy. It’s a work of great ideas where the execution isn’t always ...
Horror fans can be a tough audience to please. Speaking as a lifelong member of that tribe, I know we can be curmudgeons. We complain about remakes and sequels, while also complaining when films don’t offer the fan-service t...
Thomas Vinterberg’s Kursk tells the story of the doomed Russian submarine and the foiled attempts to rescue its hapless seamen. It’s a mix of character drama, suspenseful rescue adventure, and political film, with each...
Rosie sheds light on the plight of the working poor in Ireland by following a young family being pushed out of their middle-class lifestyle into one where the days are spent hustling for housing opportunities in a city that’...
Director Jim Hosking is a singular force. His first feature , The Greasy Strangler, was doused in anxious energy and grease, so much so that I desperately wanted to take a shower after watching it. It’s not that his films ar...
To paraphrase my initial reaction as I sat in the theater fuming, Papi Chulo is a poisionously bad, blindly racist and sadistically awful film. Supremely, unconscionable shit.
Since the early 1980s, Chinese director Chen Kaige has made films that have played to international audiences. His most celebrated was 1993’s Palme d’Or winner Farewell My Concubine. He’s delved into historical d...
Few filmmaking careers are as unpredictable as that of director Michael Winterbottom. The restlessly experimental Brit seems to go out of his way to make wildly diverging projects every time he steps behind a camera, ranging from ...