REVIEW: Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon [2022]

Forget what you know. Everyone asks Mona Lisa Lee (Jeon Jong-seo) if she has any friends. It’s the first question that comes to mind when confronting a stranger who looks lost and out of sorts with their surroundings because you want to help them find a safe place and the care of people they can trust. Unfortunately, Mona Lisa can do nothing but shake her head “No” because she’s been locked in a juvenile care facility for a decade: catatonic and in a straitjacket due to “violent tendencies” upon arrival…

Read More

REVIEW: Thor: Love and Thunder [2022]

Team kids-in-a-cage. Korg (Taika Waititi as narrator/sidekick/co-writer/director) isn’t wrong when describing Thor: Love and Thunder as a love story for the ages. What else would a heartfelt tale of blood and justice centering a romance between a man and his hammer be called? Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Mjolnir were inseparable until the former’s older sister maliciously broke the latter into pieces (don’t worry, he got payback). He’s had to live without his baby for years now, desperately trying to fill its void with an axe (Stormbreaker) despite still lamenting what…

Read More

FANTASIA22 REVIEW: Incroyable mais vrai [Incredible But True] [2022]

There’s a jewel? We all get older. It’s a part of life. Some do so gracefully. Others racked with fear. What’s interesting, and a major component of Quentin Dupieux‘s latest absurdist comedy Incroyable mais vrai [Incredible But True], is that few know which they are until they confront a potential avenue to cheat aging altogether. That’s the case with Alain (Alain Chabat) and Marie Duval (Léa Drucker). If we asked them how they felt about the subject at the start of the film, they’d probably say they hadn’t really thought…

Read More

FANTASIA22 REVIEW: Country Gold [2023]

I make nothing but hit records and baby boys. The cost of fame sits in the living room wondering aloud whether dad will be home for Christmas. Why these two young boys’ voices have been deepened to sound like they’re forty-year-old drunks slurring through a bender is beyond me (an assumption of it being a dream or game is squashed once mom enters without the effect being called out), but their words have meaning. Troyal’s (Mickey Reece channeling Garth Brooks) star has risen to unimaginable heights, and he’s embraced it…

Read More

FANTASIA22 REVIEW: Inu-ô [Inu-oh] [2022]

Here we are. Director Masaaki Yuasa and screenwriter Akiko Nogi‘s adaptation of Hideo Furukawa‘s novel The Tale of the Heike: The Inu-oh Chapters finishes with a couple screens of text describing its titular Noh performer’s final years of success despite his name being all but forgotten in comparison to the shōgun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu’s personal favorite. It’s why these three have brought the story of Inu-ô [Inu-oh] to life to ensure his name, and that of his friend Tomona from Dan-no-ura, a blind biwa-playing priest, won’t disappear again. What better way…

Read More

FANTASIA22 REVIEW: 搜神傳 [Su Huan-Jen] [Demigod: The Legend Begins] [2022]

Many things could happen in a minute. The Huang family and Pili International Multimedia are back on the big screen, two decades since their feature debut Legend of the Sacred Stone, and, if the end credits of Chris Huang‘s Demigod: The Legend Begins are to be believed, they have many more chapters in-store for their hero Su Hua-Jen. Utilizing the Taiwanese technique of budaixi (operatic glove puppetry), expert cinematography to hide the puppeteers, and impressive computer augmentation for special effects, this tale of leadership strife in the Wu Lin mountains’…

Read More

FANTASIA22 REVIEW: Polaris [2023]

In a post-eco-disaster 2144, a young girl (Viva Lee‘s Sumi) lives as a polar bear cub in the snow. She crawls around with her “mother,” growling under the stars until a sound is heard in the distance to open this world up wider. Sumi travels over the hill to discover a group of Morad hunters wielding machinery to cut down trees and brutalize whatever creatures might cross their path. When one inevitably sees Sumi in the distance, she screams to rally her ragtag clan and give chase. Most ferally run…

Read More

REVIEW: Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness [2022]

Go on red. **Potential Spoilers** I admittedly found myself uncertain when deciding which entry of the Marvel Cinematic Universe I should watch in preparation for the franchise’s latest, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Should I go all the way back before Infinity War and refresh myself with the original film considering this one is technically its sequel by name? Or should I revisit the most recent chapter from just a few months ago in Spider-Man: No Way Home considering titular hero Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) played a major…

Read More

REVIEW: De uskyldige [The Innocents] [2021]

Can I just listen? You’ve seen De uskyldige [The Innocents] before. Whether the telekinetic powers, battle between good and evil, or exploitation of neurodevelopmental disorders like Autism to supply a character a sense of power that contrasts preconceived prejudices, everything Eskil Vogt puts into his script is familiar in some way. What makes it so uniquely different in tone and expectation is therefore the choice to project those tropes onto children. His decision becomes an evolutionary progression forward from Max Landis and Josh Trank‘s Chronicle in that the sort of…

Read More

REVIEW: The Batman [2022]

No more lies. It’s been twenty years since the murder of his parents. Two since he put on the cowl. Gotham still doesn’t know what to think of the costume, but the fear it has placed inside the hearts of criminals cannot be overstated. Violence only seems to increase, though, and Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson) wonders if his presence as a vigilante seeking vengeance has done anything beyond giving offenders another figure of “justice” to run from. Saving a helpless man from a gang on Halloween, only for the victim…

Read More

REVIEW: Kicking Blood [2022]

Where do we go when we die? Living forever isn’t living. It can’t be. Without the threat of death, all you’re doing is going through the motions. Just because Anna (Alanna Bale) understands this more than her centuries-old hunting friends (Benjamin Sutherland‘s Boris and Ella Jonas Farlinger‘s Nina), however, means little if she refuses to actually change. Not that she hasn’t in superficial ways like holding down a job (working sunrise to sunset at a library) while they live off the spoils of their latest, wealthy victim. But that’s more…

Read More