Final Rating: 4.5/5 4K UHD Recommendation: Recommend Back in 1970, Judy Blume published the seminal novel, “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” to great acclaim. It is a celebrated work that still ...

Contra Zoom Pod · Episode

Final Rating: 4/5 It is a right of passage for young people to test boundaries by lashing out at authority figures, struggling with where they fit in society, and trying to find themselves. Unfortunat...

Final Rating: 3/5 Romance and rivalry develop between two university students preparing for the prestigious Putnam Competition in Niki Byrne’s The Julia Set. The Putnam Competition is a mathematics co...

Final Rating: 2/5 An army veteran and a decommissioned service dog brave the Alaskan wilderness in David Ayer’s Heart of the Beast. Heart stars Brad Pitt as James Belmont, a veteran and amateur pilot ...

Final Rating: 4.5/5 “Why don’t you take a seat?” Robert Pattinson delivers a career-best performance as “To Catch a Predator” host Chris Hansen in Primetime, the narrative feature debut of documentary...

Final Rating: 3.5/5 From director Josef Kubota Wladyka (Catch the Fair One) Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty tells the tale of love, loss and the (dance) steps to healing. Rinko Kikuchi (Babel) stars as Haru...

Final Rating: 3.5/5 4K UHD Recommendation: Recommend Here’s a little classic Hollywood thought experiment. Who are the three greatest comedic female actors before the 1970s? This is not as easy as it ...

Final Rating: 2/5 Directed by Chris Rock, Misty Green stars Rosalind Eleazar as an actress struggling to find parts several years after winning an Emmy for her TV show “Red Eye.” She’s spent the years...

Final Rating: 3/5 An actor prepares for a new role while struggling with his own mortality in the director Ira Sachs 1980s-set The Man I Love. Rami Malek stars as Jimmy George, a well-respected but mo...

Final Rating: 4/5 An aging village chief in the eastern Indian state of Nagaland fights to preserve his culture while an American missionary converts his peers to Christianity in Theja Rio’s feature d...

Final Rating: 4/5 Salvation, directed by Tom Nicoll, opens on a scene of several prim and proper white blokes delivering motivational speeches to each other at a riverbank. Under the tutelage of self-...

Final Rating: 1.5/5 From Costa Rican director Neto Villalobos Brenes, Love is the Monster follows a Grandmother (Paulina Garcia) living in a post-apocalyptic world who desperately clings to her relati...

Final Rating: 3/5 The World Before, directed by Yoon Dan-bi, centres on the relationship between Jin (Sim Su-bin) and Du-jae (Kim Eo-jin), two childhood friends reunited when Du-jae visits for his gra...

Final Rating: 1/5 A former DEA agent travels to Colombia to avenge his brother and sister-in-law, teaming up with the conflict photographer who captured their final moments in Zack Snyder’s The Last P...

Contra Zoom Pod · Episode

Final Rating: 3.5/5 Head to Head is a briskly paced satire of the Iranian media censors. Featuring a film-within-a-film and frank discussions of women’s rights in the Islamic Republic, delivered by ac...

Final Rating: 2.5/5 A down-on-his-luck former hockey player becomes coach for a reserve’s failing under-18 team in the Canadian film Smudge the Blades. Writer, director, and star Cody Lightning’s (Hey...

Final Rating: 4/5 Children Untold, directed by Miwa Nishikawa, stars Ami Koyae as Kotoko, a young girl who evacuates Tokyo before the end of World War II. Following Japan’s surrender, Kotoko returns t...

Final Rating: 4/5 Blu-Ray Recommendation: Recommend There is a certain crop of directors from the classic Hollywood period that, for decades, lived on more for their influence on other filmmakers and ...

Contra Zoom Pod · Episode

Final Rating: 4/5 Blu-Ray Recommendation: Enthusiastic Recommend The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, directed by Nathan Juran, is a throwback to an era when epics and swords and sandals movies ruled the box off...

Final Rating: 3/5 Zombies with a hivemind take over a Seoul shopping mall in Colony. Director Yeon Sang-ho’s horror film boasts impressive effects and memorable characters but suffers from confusing m...

Contra Zoom Pod · Episode

Final Rating: 4/5 Somewhere in the American desert, the lightning-fast Road Runner runs up and down miles of empty highway. A much slower Coyote trails behind in pursuit. To even the odds, the Coyote ...

Final Rating: 3/5 In 2023, Liz Sargent released a short film called Take Me Home. The short tells the story of Emily, a woman who receives a call from her low-functioning autistic adult sister Anna (p...

Final Rating: 4/5 In Buddy, a TV show for preteen kids is reimagined as an extradimensional prison overseen by a narcissistic host in a bright orange unicorn costume. Director Casper Kelly’s slasher f...

Final Rating: 3/5 In the first seconds of Luchino Visconti's Le Notti Blanche, we see a man and a woman talking by a bridge over the canals. Natalia (Maria Schell) and Mario (Marcello Mastroianni) con...

Each year, Fantasia International Film Festival offers one of the world’s greatest curated collections of horror cinema. But, between the high-profile zombie, vampire, or camp-slasher films, some of t...

Final Rating: 4/5 An opening monologue framed in cosmic camp is interrupted to ask our outwardly meek protagonist with a larger-than-life inner mindscape (Ada, voiced by Phi Palmos) if he’s done, beca...

Contra Zoom Pod · Episode

Final Rating: 2/5 Lee Kirk’s Nimrods is as close as you can get to a Green Day biopic without being a Green Day biopic. A trio of high school boys in a band unknowingly find themselves on the wrong en...

Final Rating: 3.5/5 Blu-ray Recommendation: Recommend When the New Hollywood era kicked off in the late 1960s, conventional ways of telling stories in film were challenged. Often, filmmakers of this e...

Final Rating: 2/5 In God Skin, which screened at Fantasia Festival, a Thai delivery boy becomes a cybernetically enhanced underground boxer to earn money for his mother’s hospital bills. Tackling them...

Final Rating: 4/5 In film history, female filmmakers were anecdotes. Despite being pioneers, they are relegated to side notes in favor of the canon. There are multiple examples, such as Maya Deren's M...

Final Rating: 2/5 The Peril at Pincer Point, playing at Fantasia Festival, is a low-budget absurdist throwback to mid-century monster movies and folk horror. The film features inventive sound design, ...

Final Rating: 3/5 In Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Sheep in the Box, a couple adopts a robot made to look and act like their deceased son. In re-integrating their “son” into the family, the parents are forced t...

Final Rating: 4.5/5 Composer Hettarher’s spare, moody music opens the tale with ominous tones, which swath a rugged seaside draped in near-darkness – pink streaks striking through the sky the only rel...

Final Rating: 1.5/5 Attack on Paradise, playing at Fantasia Festival, is an action thriller film, from director Bob Colaers, pitting an ex-con and a rookie cop against a drug lord’s gang, conveniently...

Contra Zoom Pod · Episode

Final Rating: 4.5/5 Early on in Bruce McDonald’s 2008 film Pontypool, playing at Fantasia Festival, our protagonist Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), asks the philosophical question “when should you cal...

Final Rating: 2/5 William Woods’ directorial debut, The Outer Threat, follows a family of four after the parents discover evidence of extraterrestrial life. This revelation coincides with hostile dron...

Final Rating: 2.5/5 You Are the Film, playing at Fantasia Festival, is a low-budget experimental dramedy about two people who discover that they are the main characters of a movie. Makoto Ueda’s direc...

Final Rating: 3.5/5 Obie’s life sucks. His perverted boss just laid him off, even though he’s the only one who knows the codes. On his way to his date with his girlfriend, he gets hassled by the Salad...

Final Rating: 3/5 Tight Lettuce is a dark comedy showing the all-consuming nature of addiction, not for the addict, but for the people around him. Directed by Harrison Haude in his feature debut and p...