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…

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REVIEW: Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets [2017]

“We can forgive, but we will never forget” Sci-fi fantasy Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is the most expensive European and independent (anywhere) production ever at approximately $200 million dollars—high enough that writer/director/producer Luc Besson pretty much leveraged his distribution shingle EuropaCorp before bringing STX on as a partner to defer costs and get it into theaters. Now questions are floated about whether it can ever turn a profit after “bomb” proved too weak a word to describe its reception by the American box office. The odds…

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REVIEW: Réalité [Reality] [2015]

“The insides serve no purpose” This is what it’s like to go insane. Writer/director Quentin Dupieux loves the surreal and absurd, but Réalité [Reality] takes his penchant for humorous oddity to another level. With Philip Glass‘ “Music with Changing Parts” boring a hole into your temple and fluid sequences of characters meeting in real time or via some from of media projection (and sometimes both at once), the filmmaker revels in keeping his audience off balance and unsure. The beauty of it this time, though, is how he provides us…

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REVIEW: The Science of Sleep [2006]

“Will you marry me when you’re seventy and have nothing to lose?” Michel Gondry’s first foray into that of solo writer/director has finally been released outside the festival circuit. The Science of Sleep was created without the help of writing collaborator Charlie Kaufmann whose scripts for Human Nature and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind were brought to the screen by the visual prowess of Gondry. There is a void apparent as the story is not as tight and coherent, (if you can call a Kaufmann script either), as his…

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