5 Best Movies To Watch After Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Mt. Natagumo Arc (2021)

In addition to new releases, Fantastic Fest also presented a selection of largely forgotten oddities from the past. This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the work being covered here wouldn't exist. Although Fantastic Fest is the place to see the latest in genre films running the gamut from expensive blockbusters like The Creator to any number of micro-budget oddities, it also allows attendees the chance to see revivals of older films that also range from the famous (or at least notorious) to titles so obscure that many viewers may not have even heard of them before. Continue Reading →

Fantasa International Film Festival gets wild. Animals feature prominently in our first three films of the 2023 Fantasia International Film Festival. From the bottom of the ocean to the reaches of the Arctic, these films mix their natural settings with unnatural mediums to create enchanting works that are wondrous to look at. Though they have different objectives, these films remind us that cinema is a world of dreams that combines things from our lived reality with our limitless imagination.  (Tribeca Film Festival Deep Sea  Continue Reading →

The John Wick films are, simply put, the standard-bearer for American action in the 21st century. When the first came out in 2014, it shook the foundations of what we felt was possible in a Hollywood action landscape predominantly concerned with CGI energy blasts: It put stuntwork front and center, crafted labyrinthine mythology as dense and unnecessary as it was innately compelling in its flavor, and -- most importantly -- brought Keanu Reeves back to the public consciousness in a big way. Basically, it's some of the few times American action movies can even hope to compete with what comes out of Eastern Europe and Asia. And now, that saga comes to a close with John Wick: Chapter 4, a film that took two years after completion to come out, and feels like a final exhale of relief after hours of unrelenting, inventive action. Continue Reading →

A year before The Village’s release, a copy of the script was stolen and distributed to sites with zero compunction about reviewing stolen materials. If you were on the internet in the naughty aughties and a fan of movies, you know exactly the type. The flurry of reviews that followed riled up readers of such sites. It reached the point that, by the film’s 2004 release, a considerable legion of film nerds already stood poised to carve up a movie they were certain would be a turkey. Continue Reading →

There’s a word that exists in the Italian language that doesn’t quite have a counterpart in any other language: sprezzatura. What it essentially boils down to is the art of looking like you don’t care – a style of perfectly-studied imperfection. This idea goes back at least to the Renaissance, a time when the Gucci family earned its reputation as skilled saddlemakers to the rich and aristocratic. Or at least that’s how Aldo Gucci, the powerful and powerfully at-ease paterfamilias played by Al Pacino, relates the family history in Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci. It is against this backdrop – of wealth, power, history, and above all, style – that Scott and screenwriters Roberto Bentivegna and Becky Johnston weave their story, an uneven yet compelling story about the only person who became a Gucci through their own making rather than by an accident of birth, and yet was forever an outsider.  Continue Reading →