The conclusion of Fantasia International Film Festival’s 27th edition brings the temptation to paint a “big picture overview” of the state of the film industry in general, in particular the genre community. The Montréal-based three-week event has never been about blinding star power (while Nicolas Cage was scheduled to be onhand to receive this year’s Cheval Noir Career Achievement Award, the actor had to cancel due to the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strikes), instead putting directors and audiences front and center. Like last year, a highly anticipated A24 horror release made an appearance just days before opening theatrically (last year Halina Reijn’s […]
by Erik Luers on Aug 31, 2023Fantasia International Film Festival announces today the third wave of titles for its 2023 lineup, with first and second wave titles revealed earlier this spring. The 27th edition of the festival will run from July 20 through August 9 at Montreal’s Concordia Hall Cinema, with additional screenings to be held at the J.A. DeSève Cinema, Cinémathèque québécoise, and Cinéma du Musée. Pre-sale tickets will be available on Saturday, July 15 at 1pm EST. In the meantime, check out the full list of additional titles, panels, events and jurors at this year’s Fantasia, and visit the festival’s official website for more […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 6, 2023Fantasia International Film Festival announces today a second wave of titles to screen at the festival’s forthcoming 27th edition, which will take place in Montreal from July 20 through August 9. Screenings, workshops and launch events will be hosted at the Concordia Hall Cinema, with additional screenings located at the Cinémathèque Québécoise and Cinéma du Musée. A first wave of programming for the festival was announced last month, and the full Fantasia 2023 lineup will be announced in early July. Until then, read the full list of second wave titles below or on Fantasia’s official website. Red Rooms Coming to […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jun 8, 2023The Fantasia International Film Festival announces today the first wave of programming for its forthcoming 27th edition, to take place in Montreal, Québec from July 20 through August 9. An initial highlight from this year’s slate includes a spotlight on South Korean cinema, which will feature several retrospective titles and a handful of premieres. Jung Bum-shik’s (Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum) The New Normal will have its North American premiere, and there will be Canadian premieres of An Tae-jin’s The Night Owl, Lee Sang-yong’s The Roundup: No Way Out and the 4K restoration of Jeong Jae-un’s Take Care of My Cat (2001). […]
by Filmmaker Staff on May 11, 2023An unwritten rule of public restroom usage is that one should never attempt to strike up a conversation with the person one stall over, and that’s doubly true if the person next to you is an all-powerful god sent down from the cosmos. After a night of grieving and binge-drinking leads to hugging the toilet bowl at a gross rural rest stop, Wes (Ryan Kwanten) finds himself in that scenario when the person in the stall introduces themselves. That person is nothing more than a voice funneled through a gloryhole, but what that voice requests of Wes (and why) raises […]
by Erik Luers on Sep 21, 2022For its 26th edition, the Fantasia International Film Festival returned to a fully in-person, three-week event in downtown Montréal. The festival has always been my own personal summer retreat, affording me a few days in Canada to embrace the undying creativity of the independent horror scene and the festival’s homegrown traditions. For reasons I’ve never fully understood but have always been happy to accept the entire audience erupts in applause at a generic TV spot for Nongshim ramen and, as the lights go down before a film, loudly meows like a cat. If you attend a screening in Concordia University’s Sir […]
by Erik Luers on Aug 10, 2022I first encountered Joonas Neuvonen’s Lost Boys, a sort of “unintended sequel” to 2010’s spectacular look at self-destructive Subutex addicts in rural Finland, Reindeerspotting: Escape from Santaland – which was co-written and edited by Lost Boys co-director Sadri Cetinkaya – at this year’s virtual CPH:DOX. At the time I tried but failed to take notes while watching. The film just got under my skin in a way that froze me to my laptop screen. Atmospherically, Neuvonen’s decade-later doc brought to mind the sensation of being trapped inside a Nine Inch Nails video. Memorably narrated by Pekka Strang (Tom of Finland), Lost Boys picks up where Reindeerspotting left off: After […]
by Lauren Wissot on Aug 25, 2021The Fantasia Film Festival has just announced the first titles from its upcoming 25th anniversary edition, which will take place as a virtual event from August 5 – 21. Films will be accessible to Canadian audiences via a platform created by Festival Scope and Shift72. The festival organizers will be listening to the advice of local health authorities and may add a limited number of in-person events closer to the festival date. The titles and descriptions, from the fest’s high-spirited press release, are below. THE LAST THING MARY SAW. Brace yourself for THE LAST THING MARY SAW, a breathtaking period occult […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 19, 2021A good friend, suffering from an incurable case of acute cinephilia, recently informed me that we are “living in a golden age of horror,” citing breakout hits like Jordan Peele’s doppelgänger-dependent Us and Ari-Aster’s bucolically-tinged relationship drama Midsommar. But for every horror film remade (“reimagined”) to inspired results (Lars Klevberg’s Child’s Play), a muddled, paint-by-numbers redo isn’t far behind (Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer’s Pet Sematary). For every step forward the ever-growing Conjuring Universe took, it’s always as a result of first taking two steps back (the Nixon era period pieces The Curse of La Llorona and, to a lesser […]
by Erik Luers on Sep 5, 2019I normally go to the Seattle International Film Festival towards the end, when the festival hosts its largest contingent of industry types and you get to go to the top of the Space Needle, where the annual awards brunch is held, for free. As an out-of-towner, it’s necessary to focus on a weekend or two; Seattle’s is the country’s largest festival by sheer volume of films, screening exactly 400 this year, so it’s clearly impossible to see a significant chunk of the program — even if you decided to stay for the fest’s entire entire three-and-a-half week duration. Of the […]
by Brandon Harris on Aug 8, 2017