FANTASTIC FEST: Menilmontant (1926)
Not all silent movies are silly bits of fluff. Menilmontant begins with the axe murder of its two leads parents, sending the two sisters to Paris and rough neighborhood of the title. They try to survive just by selling artificial flowers, but there’s no way that they’ll make it. Director Dimitri Kirsanoff didn’t include any […]
FANTASTIC FEST: A Trip to the Moon (1902)
The best remembered film of Georges Méliès, this film was such a success upon its early release that it was one of the first films to be bootlegged*. Based loosely on Jules Vernes’ From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon. Professor Barbenfouillis and five brave astronomers — Nostradamus, Alcofrisbas, Omega, Micromegas and […]
FANTASTIC FEST: Ballet Mecanique (1924)
A Dadaist post-Cubist art film conceived, written and co-directed by Fernand Léger in collaboration with the filmmaker Dudley Murphy with cinematographic input from Man Ray, Balley Mecanique is as gorgeous and groundbreaking today as it was nearly a hundred years ago. Flashes of images — a young woman and a smile are all the humanity we […]
FANTASTIC FEST: Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror(2021)
If you have even a passing interest in the world of folk horror, Kier-La Janisse’s exhaustive exploration — which clocks in at 3 hours and 14 minutes and could have been a thousand more if I had my way — is the film of a lifetime. The ‘unholy trinity’ that launched this trend on to […]
FANTASTIC FEST: Mad God (2021)
We shouldn’t have to tell you who Phil Tippett is. He’s the artist who animated everything from the Star Wars miniature chess scene to ED-209 in RoboCop, the aliens of Starship Troopers and the dragons in Willow and Dragonslayer. He’s been working Mad God for thirty years and let me tell you — it was worth it. An assassin explores a […]
FANTASTIC FEST: The Trip (2021)
Scandanavian director Tommy Wirkola is known in the United States for Dead Snow and Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. Now, he has created this film, which was called I onde dager (In Bad Days) in its home country. It concerns a couple — Noomi Rapace (who played Lisabeth Salander in the original films) and Aksel Hennie — who go away […]
FANTASTIC FEST: Saloum (2021)
Bangui’s Hyenas, an elite mercenary team, have already extracted a drug dealer and his treasure from the chaos of a coup and are heading straight for the payout in Dakar. Yet as much as we love it when a plan comes together, we also seem to love a movie where things fall apart. And the […]
FANTASTIC FEST: Devil Story (1986)
Also known as Once Upon A Time…The Devil, we have the almighty Vinegar Syndrome to thank for this movie being newly restored in 4K from its 35mm original camera negative. I’ve had a bootleg of this waiting to be watched for years because I knew someday that I would need to call upon its infernal power to […]
FANTASTIC FEST: Mother Schmuckers (2021)
Issachar & Zabulon, two scumbag brothers, have lost just about everything including a place to get food, now that they’ve lost one more thing — January Jack, their mother’s beloved dog. And unless they get it back in 24 hours, they’re out of her house. Starring — as well as written and directed by along […]
FANTASTIC FEST: The Marco Effect (2021)
Based on the Department Q series by Jussi Adler-Olsen, this is the fifth in a series of movies and seeing as how I haven’t seen any of the other ones, I think I can get past Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Fares Fares not being in this movie and Ulrich Thomsen takes on the role of Detective […]
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