Long before “fantastic cinema” became a thing, Montreal’s Fantasia already was an institution. The grand-peré of North American genre film festivals marked its 25th edition this summer, its second in this nervous and conflicted new age of hybrid online/IRL presentations, and despite the obstacles and anxieties inherent in such, the event as ever stuck to its fundamental mission. Montreal was founded by Catholic missionaries 1642, but the festival’s lower-case catholic taste is its strong suit. Even while checking off all the boxes – Russian Screen Life freakouts (#Blue_Whale), Japanese stop-motion cyber-horror (Junk Head), revivals of obscure Swiss mid-60s spy thrillers […]

U.S. and Canada in Progress, the event taking place during Wroclaw’s American Film Festival each November, has extended its submission deadline for American and Canadian independent filmmakers with works-in-progress seeking post-production support to September 17. The program offers selected American and Canadian projects in final production stages European sales agents, distributors, and festival programmers) and partnering Polish top post-production companies (including Fixafilm, Orka Studio, Soundflower, XANF). In-kind services valued at $40,000 will be awarded, and the Polish Film Institute additionally offers a prize of $10,000 in Polish post-production services. There’s no fee to apply, and submission details can be found […]

Director and documentarian Yuri Ancarani carries significant reputation and exposure in the art world—he is arguably vaunted there more than in cinema—but his recent Venice premiere Atlantide unexpectedly evokes some unlikely multiplex-oriented fare. As more audiences and critics see this work, will comparisons reign towards Michael Mann’s irrepressible Miami Vice from 2006? What about—of all things—the Fast and the Furious franchise? There are little streets and tarmac in Atlantide’s observation of the Venetian lagoon, so the disaffected local adolescents must channel their energy (and indirectly, their sexuality) into pulsating barchino (speedboat) races—and we all know about the proportionate relationship between motorsports […]

In a tender moment in Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers, the opener of this year’s Venice Film Festival, the older of the eponymous mothers teaches the other how to peel potatoes while wearing a t-shirt that says “We Should All Be Feminists.” Since Janis (Penélope Cruz) is at the cusp of middle age, whereas Ana (Milena Smit) has only just turned 18, there’s a suggestion of baton-passing in this Jeanne Dielman reference. One wonders, then, what Chantal Akerman might have thought of the scene in which Ana relates, with a casualness pitched ambiguously between PTSD and nonchalance, that her pregnancy was […]

Two of this year’s high-profile Venice premieres, Dune and The Card Counter, are auteurist works recognizable by multiple of their makers’ signatures. Both star Oscar Isaac and arrive as pandemic-affected productions that (try to) bear no trace of that circumstance. Dune finished principal photography before COVID-19’s global spread, while The Card Counter was 3/4 of the way through production when it hit; Isaac completed its rescheduled remainder before flying to Hungary for Dune reshoots. Optimistically subtitled Part I (this covers the first of the novel’s three volumes)*, Dune arrives with the unplanned burden of attempting to make the case for the Big Screen Experience—Denis Villeneuve’s been very […]

In light of the ongoing pandemic and, more pertinently, its repercussions on the public screening of films, weighing in on a festival in any peremptory way might be trickier than ever. This year’s Locarno Film Festival, which returned to its physical form after last year’s hiatus, is a case in point. If the mere fact of being once again able to enjoy a film in the safely distanced and masked company of dispassionate strangers is cause for celebration, the work can still be indigestibly lousy even under these jubilant circumstances. The relative joy and definite privilege of being able to […]