She Dies Tomorrow – Review Sophie Butcher August 28, 2020 Reviews Fear is a powerful thing. In Amy Seimetz’s weird, warped She Dies Tomorrow, it’s so powerful that it becomes contagious. It opens with a quiet, experimental buildup. Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) is moping...
Bleed With Me – Fantasia Festival 2020 Review Alysha Prasad August 27, 2020 Reviews Bleed With Me, from writer-director Amelia Moses, is a terrifying fever dream that makes you question everything you thought you knew, filled with beautiful imagery and a lot of blood. Timid and...
Kriya – Fantasia Film Festival 2020 Review Alysha Prasad August 26, 2020 Reviews “In Hindu custom, it is ritually prescribed that a son must perform his father’s last rites.” This sentence hangs on the screen, setting up for the rest of Sidharth Srinivasan’s Kriya, a film that...
The Five Rules of Success – Fantasia Festival 2020 Review Alysha Prasad August 25, 2020 Reviews “I want to lead an important life, I want to do it because I was born a human being.” This powerful line from The Five Rules of Success by writer-director Orson Oblowitz perfectly encompasses the point of...
Detention – Fantasia Festival 2020 Review Alysha Prasad August 25, 2020 Reviews “As long as someone’s alive, there is always hope.” During the Cold War in 1962, Taiwan was under martial law, where those who subverted the government by speaking out about freedom or reading banned...
Tenet – Review Rob Salusbury August 24, 2020 Reviews If there’s one thing Christopher Nolan loves, it's spectacle. And chaos. And headaches. Okay, so there are several things that Nolan is passionate about, and they’re all very much present in Tenet....
Feels Good Man – Fantasia Festival 2020 Review Alysha Prasad August 23, 2020 Reviews By now, everyone has surely seen Pepe the Frog at least once, whether it be whilst scrolling innocently through the web or even stumbling upon it on the news or late night talk shows. What most people aren’t...
Sócrates – Review Calum Baker August 21, 2020 Reviews Sócrates opens with a death, or rather a specific moment after that death. An abrupt cut shows us, in closeup, a woman laid on her back, eyes closed, with someone else’s hand touching her forehead and...
Ava – Review Fatima Sheriff August 21, 2020 Reviews Ava opens with a scene we can all recognise: a mother dropping off her daughter at school, the daughter complaining of embarrassment, the mother fussing over lunch and safety. But here, this comfortable...
Doppelbänger – Fantasia Festival 2020 Review Alysha Prasad August 20, 2020 Reviews The very idea that human beings may one day be rendered obsolete by improving technology is a hard concept to swallow. Sofian Khan’s short film, Doppelbänger, transports us into the future, where there...
Don’t Text Back – Fantasia Festival 2020 Review Alysha Prasad August 18, 2020 Reviews What’s scarier than a satanic cult? A men’s rights group. Mariel Sharp and Kaye Adelaide, directors and producers, present Don’t Text Back, a horror short made by a group of women and LGBTQ+ artists....
Yes, God, Yes – Review Chris Edwards August 17, 2020 Reviews There is hardly a niche in the market for comedies about teens having a hard time in high school – Netflix pretty much has that side of the film industry covered. We know the drill: rumours fly and spread...
Spree – Review Scott Wilson August 16, 2020 Reviews What, really, can be called authentic in a time of social media personas and rampant reality television? For Kurt Kunkle, it’s live-streaming The Lesson, a twisted mission acted out as a Spree driver, a taxi...
Hail to the Deadites – Fantasia Festival 2020 Review Alysha Prasad August 16, 2020 Reviews No one who was a part of the first Evil Dead film could have imagined that it would turn into the franchise it is today, nor that the popularity of the films would just continue to grow over time. Steve...
Life: Untitled – Fantasia Festival 2020 Review Alysha Prasad August 15, 2020 Reviews Kana Yamada’s directorial debut, Life: Untitled, begins with a jarring opening where the viewer is addressed directly by a young woman standing there without a shirt, and is asked, “is my life worth...