By Gabby Foor and Keri O’Shea We were delighted to be offered Fantasia’s short film blocks for coverage again this year. Small Gauge Trauma, the festival’s genre short film collection, is a great way to spot upcoming talent, clever homage, brand-new ideas and ingenious storytelling. As ever, the range has been incredible, with everything from […]
New Life (2023) opens in medias res: a bloodied, panicked young woman makes her way along a street, clearly fearful of being seen or stopped. She heads home, cleans herself up – but her safety and her memories of this place soon get left behind, and she’s moving again. It’s immediately clear that an old […]
There’s a shot of fallen fruit rotting in a gutter as Sometimes I think About Dying (2023) opens, and not to get into a scene-by-scene analysis of the film, but this image symbolises a lot about the story to follow. In a picturesque but doubtlessly dull coastal town, we meet Fran (Daisy Ridley). Fran is […]
Review by Darren Gaskell When directionless Taka (Sho Mineo) receives a mysterious tape containing details as to the whereabouts of his hitherto missing archaeologist brother Mune (So Yamanaka) he sets off on a rescue mission, which also comes complete with side quest relating to the retrieval of a wooden box. Of course, the wooden box […]
Home Invasion (2023) is not your standard style of documentary; there’s no talking heads here, no voiceover, no familiar features as such. Instead, it all unfolds via on-screen text, which displays to viewers via what looks like an aperture, representing the film’s key subject matter (or at least, key for the first hour): the home […]
My first short film experience was an enchanting one. Transylvanie, the French short film from writer and director Rodrigue Huart, is a dark, beautiful little story, straddling the world of Let the Right One In, of how children are already a little like vampires: secretive, creative, and a bit creepy sometimes. The tale follows young […]
Слава Україні Героям слава!Glory to Ukraine, Glory to the Heroes! In the early hours of February 22nd, 2022, the Russian state began an illegal and unprovoked military invasion of the sovereign state of Ukraine, heralded by a nationwide blitzkrieg air attack. The country was thrown into instant chaos, as two million people fled their homes […]
The ‘Satanic Panic’ of the latter decades of the 20th Century serves as a deeply unedifying lesson in paranoia, exploitation and groupthink. It also reminds us of the human capacity to ignore the overt to fantasise over the covert: this impulse is still with us, now aided and abetted by the internet and social media; […]
With the help of Shotaro Ishinomori, writer and director Hideaki Anno is back with another iconic hero entry into the massively popular Shin Japan Heroes Universe with Shin Kamen Rider (2023). Created to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Kamen Rider which debuted in the early 70s and boasts nearly 100 episodes, this film comes only […]
Hippo (2023) isn’t a particularly easy film to sum up, much less to recommend along easily definable lines: it’s an often moody, deeply eclectic, art-house-leaning project with a storyline which is both minimal and yet…profound, at times. It doesn’t sit snugly in any one genre, it moves from vast or unpalatable topics into domestic familiarity […]
I haven’t had a film pull me in so many different directions at once in some time, all of them curious and moving. With Love and a Major Organ, an absolute genre bender packed with innovation from director Kim Albright and writer Julia Lederer, is full to the brim with emotion, though no person is […]