Fantastic Fest Archives -

THE FORBIDDEN CITY MOVIE REVIEW Genre-fusing sometimes is an awkward affair, ending up with a film that doesn’t know what it is. But sometimes it creates something that feels very new. Sometimes it ends up being epic. Fortunately this is the case for The Forbidden City. The story follows Mei, a girl who along with […]

BEAST OF WAR MOVIE REVIEW When a ship of Australian soldiers goes down in the middle of the ocean on their way to fight in WWII, only a handful survive. They find themselves in a calm, windless sea on a makeshift raft. There’s no water, food, several are seriously injured, and there’s one big and […]

IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU MOVIE REVIEW Linda (Rose Byrne) is so very, very tired. She has a young daughter with severe enough of an eating disorder that she needs to be fed by a stomach tube or she will die. Her husband is away for work so she has to do everything […]

OBSESSION MOVIE REVIEW We’ve all been in a position where we cared so very deeply for someone and wished they felt the same for us but felt hopeless to make it happen. Bear (Michael Johnston) probably isn’t hopeless with his feelings for Nikki (Inde Navarrette) being reciprocated but he’ll never know. Because he used a […]

PRIMATE MOVIE REVIEW Lucy is coming home from college to stay with her family in their implausibly awesome home on a cliff in Hawaii. Her two friends Kate and Hannah are coming as well but Hannah is in for a big surprise: there’s another member of the family they didn’t tell her about: a chimpanzee […]

SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT MOVIE REVIEW We could understand if trashy slashers from the 80s (no matter how fun they might be to some of us) were not your thing, that you might avoid a modern remake of one of the most infamous of them, Silent Night, Deadly Night. However, you would be doing yourself […]

THE CURSE MOVIE REVIEW Bringing back a 90’s J-horror vibe, director/writer Kenichi Ugana (Visitors) dives into technology curses with their new film, The Curse. Riko and her roommate have a friend back in Taiwan who has posted an odd and creepy picture on their social media. Even weirder, the text is uncharacteristically dark as are […]

SHELBY OAKS MOVIE REVIEW A popular online video series of paranormal haunt investigators turns into a huge mystery when after going to investigate an abandoned town, Shelby Oaks, all four members of the cast go missing. The case drags on for years and years until only the sister of one of them still is determined […]

IKATAN DARAH MOVIE REVIEW This Indonesian action film from legend Iko Uwais’s new production banner follows Mega, a talented athlete and fighter whose career is sidelined from an injury. Her brother is a serious but unsuccessful gambler and after gambling the deed to their house away, goes to the gangster he owes money to in […]

INFESTATION: FANTASTIC FEST 2025 – COYOTES Justin Long and Kate Bosworth both are a married couple and play one in this horror film set in the Hollywood Hills. When coyotes suddenly start showing up in their neighborhood and attacking/killing the neighbors, the family must band together, with the additional aid of a ‘lady of the […]

THE CREEP TAPES SERIES REVIEW After two successful and highly thought of found footage movies, Mark Duplass as Josef with Patrick Brice back in the director’s chair return to tell more stories of the strangest serial killer in The Creep Tapes. Going from films to a six-episode Shudder tv series may seem like an ‘uh-oh’ […]

ESCAPE FROM THE 21ST CENTURY MOVIE REVIEW Three High School best friends, after an encounter with some toxic waste, get a super-inconvenient superpower. Whenever they sneeze, their bodies in 1999 fall unconscious and their minds go into their own bodies twenty years in the future. This also apparently wipes out the personalities that exist in […]

DADDY’S HEAD MOVIE REVIEW A young boy named Isaac whose father has just died, and who not long before had to deal with the death of his mother, is withdrawn and upset. Laura (Julia Brown) had recently married Isaac’s father and now as the sole caregiver without much of a connection with the boy even […]

BETTER MAN MOVIE REVIEW Oh My God, It Was Earth All Along, You Finally Made a Monkey Out of Me. It was a missed opportunity not to have iconic singer Robbie Williams belt out a version of the Troy McClure song in the biopic about his life Better Man. Why? Because the part of Robbie […]

THE APPRENTICE MOVIE REVIEW Get ready for the movie that gives you the story of why we live in such an insane world. The story of Donald Trump and how he got to be…well…like he is. Sebastian Stan takes on Trump with a measured performance as we see him at first as a young man. […]

HOUSE OF SPOILS MOVIE REVIEW Ariana DeBose plays Chef, who has just gotten her big shot thanks to an enthusiastic investor (Arian Moayed) to run her own restaurant. It’s going to be very high-end, set in a crumbling mansion way out in the countryside. Expectations are high and she is ready to deliver, despite being […]

TRIZOMBIE MOVIE REVIEW In another ‘probably only at Fantastic Fest’ movie, one of the few zombie entries this year was the Belgian film Trizombie. In most ways this is a traditional zombie story with a group of survivors who must make a trek across zombie infested areas in order to reach their goal. The difference […]

DON’T MESS WITH GRANDMA MOVIE REVIEW There are a lot of home invasion films out there these days, some of ’em pretty scary and intense. That is NOT the vibe that Don’t Mess With Grandma (formerly Sunset Superstar) is going for. Michael Jai White plays Jasper, a gentle giant and a big Dio fan who […]

DEAD TALENTS SOCIETY MOVIE REVIEW It’s odd to describe a film with as much gore and supernatural scary stuff in it as Dead Talents Society as ‘delightful’ and even ‘heartwarming’, but here we are. It’s the sort of thing that can happen at Fantastic Fest. This Taiwanese film takes place on Earth, but from the […]

THE WILD ROBOT MOVIE REVIEW Dreamworks Animation is here with another big prestige project, The Wild Robot. With Chris Sanders at the helm, who directed Lilo & Stitch, How To Train Your Dragon, and The Croods, you can be reasonably sure it’s going to be a good one. And lo, it delivers. The story takes […]

HEAVIER TRIP MOVIE REVIEW One of the low-key hits of 2018 among folks who actually go to see bizarro foreign films at movie fests was Heavy Trip. The story followed the four members of the metal band Impaled Rektum and their insane misadventures. Basically, Wayne’s World in Europe but with a more surreal and very […]

SATURDAY NIGHT MOVIE REVIEW The story of Saturday Night Live’s beginnings is one of a show hindered by chaotic creatives, unconvinced executives, drugs, sex, and one very beleaguered but determined showrunner. Director Jason Reitman brings us the story of the 90 minutes before SNL went live for the first time and how close it came […]

ANORA MOVIE REVIEW Writer/director Sean Baker hits Fantastic Fest with the Palme d’Or winner at Cannes this year, Anora. Ani (Mikey Madison) is a stripper whose life in New York City is filled with parties, sex, and fun. Because she can speak Russian, her boss connects her with a young Russian son of an oligarch […]

TERRIFIER 3 MOVIE REVIEW One of the best things about Fantastic Fest is how there’s something very nichey for every taste. And if your taste runs to unbelievably explicit gore and goofy clown killers, then you already know all about director/writer Damien Leone’s Terrifier series. The third entry dips into the beloved subgenre of Xmas […]

THE RULE OF JENNY PEN MOVIE REVIEW John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush play two men in a nursing home who go to war with each other. That’s certainly enough of a selling point alone for the Fantastic Fest film, The Rule of Jenny Pen. But the film we saw wasn’t exactly what we expected. Rush […]