FANTASTIC FEST: Sweetie, You Won’t Believe It (2020)
Dastan’s wife is very high maintenance. And very pregnant. So when his friends leave on a fishing trip, he decides to go along, seeing it was one last getaway before becoming a dad. Which would be all well and good, except he and his friends see a mob hit. And then the mob sees them. And then the backwoods […]
FANTASTIC FEST: Samuel’s Travels (2021)
Somewhere in the backwoods of Latvia — perhaps even on the edge of a mythical forest — Sam is a long way from Belgium. He’s looking for his father and is distracted, which leads to him hitting a piglet with his car. He tries to bury it, but it’s still alive, so to make amends, […]
FANTASTIC FEST: Preman (2021)
After young Pandu witnesses the murder of an old man who refuses to leave his property and hurts local gangster boss Guru, he must turn to his deaf father Sandi. The trouble is that his father is also a gangster and if he turns against his crime family, he may as well just kill himself. But […]
FANTASTIC FEST: The Timekeepers of Eternity (2021)
The Langoliers may be at the bottom of Stephen King adaptions, but if The Timekeepers of Eternity has any say in things, we’ve been misjudging Tom Holland’s 1995 TV miniseries. Animator Aristotelis Maragkos has printed every frame of that movie and used collage animation to reconstruct, remix and retell the story in an entirely new way, […]
FANTASTIC FEST: Mlungu Wam (2021)
The title of this movie is Xhosa and translates as Good Madam, as the white madam is at the center of this film, a comatose woman being looked after by Mavis, the mother of Tisdi, this movie’s protagonist. As they live in the wealthy suburbs of Cape Town — yet always apart from the city — […]
FANTASTIC FEST: Masking Threshold (2021)
Masking Threshold is one of the stranger films I’ve seen in some time, almost a YouTube video filled with non-stop zoom-in screens and talking from a person we never see, an IT person (physically played by Johannes Grenzfurthner with spoken performance by Ethan Haslam) who has been dealing with non-stop ringing in his ears for […]
FANTASTIC FEST: Hellbender (2021)
Toby Poser, John Adams, and their daughters Zelda and Lulu made The Deeper You Dig, a movie that divided Becca and me. For their follow-up, the Adams family has created a movie all about 16-year-old Izzy (Zelda), whose mother (Toby Poser) keeps isolated due to a rare illness. Yet as Izzy begins to grow as a woman — beyond playing metal […]
FANTASTIC FEST: Dealer (2021)
Johnny is a street-smart kid who spends his weekdays in a group home but soon learns that he can no longer go home on the weekends. He’s a mover and shaker, though, as he sells cocaine and avoids getting caught because after all, he’s just a kid. Then he meets Antony, an actor whose pocket […]
FANTASTIC FEST: King Car (2021)
Imagine Christine with political messages. Yes, in King Car, Uno — a taxi company owner’s son — is able to speak to cars — because he was born in the back of a taxi — and has become close friends with the vehicle that saved him from a traffic accident as a young child at the cost of […]
FANTASTIC FEST: Dead & Beautiful (2021)
A group of five young and wealthy friends has gathered to attend the funeral of one of their number but it’s all a ruse. The group seems to have done this before — what are they the cast of the Full Moon movie Prison of the Dead? — so they all head off to the […]
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