Festivals Features
SXSW 2025 Wrap: All Our Reviews, Interviews, and More
The sound of silence is deafening. SXSW 2025 has concluded this year's edition. Last week the jury and special awards were announced. Our coverage is not quite complete; we'll update this post as a few more articles roll in this...
SXSW 2025 Preview: Fun Films Galore at Texas's Biggest Throwdown
Now that the serious business of Sundance and Oscar Season have come to a close, we can turn our attention to what really matters... a wild festival of good times, BBQ, and too many great movies to see in Texas's...
Rotterdam 2025: What The Audiences Liked Best
Three weeks ago, Rotterdam wrapped up its International Film Festival, and a few days after that they published the final results of their audience ratings, which is always a highlight for me. As the saying goes, everybody is a critic,...
Friday One Sheet: Calgary Underground 2025
"Lowbrow maximalist illustrations brimming with thoughtful puns, juicy buns, and innuendo." This is how illustrator Hamburger Hands (aka Kyle Schneider) describes his work, here for the 22nd Calgary Underground Film Festival, and its key art. It is an ode to Underground Comix...
Berlinale 2025 Preview: Richard Linklater, Lucile Hadžihalilović, Radu Jude, Hong Sangsoo, Gabriel Mascaro
The 2025 Berlinale Film Festival marks a new chapter in its storied history, debuting under the artistic leadership of Tricia Tuttle with a line-up that seeks to embrace audience friendly world cinema.
Friday One Sheet: THE NIGHT IS DARK AND COLDER THAN THE DAY
Here is a beautiful use of text and negative space, from IFFR, The International Film Festival Rotterdam in south Holland. Christina Friedrich's film may have a lengthy, and debatably cumbersome title, The Night Is Dark And Colder Than The Day,...
Sundance 2025 Reviews: What We Saw, Liked and Loved
Updated 2/17/25. On January 23, 2025, the center of our genre-film loving world moved to Park City, Utah, US, where the Sundance Film Festival unveiled a broad and diverse selection of films. Our own Mel Valentin attended the festival in...
Friday One Sheet: I LOVE YOU FOREVER
For Cazzie David and Elisa Kalani's anti RomCom, I Love You Forever, the key art is all about the blank white wall. I know I have been going on for some time about the death of movie credit blocks on...
Sundance 2025 Preview: Another Year of Exciting Films
It's been a bit of a weird start to 2025, but festival season is kicking off in earnest with the traditional chilly celebration of indie film that is the Sundance Film Festival. The fest includes 88 feature films in this...
Friday One Sheet: UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE
Brutalism is back, baby! Behold the mighty Winnipeg mortar arches, and thin veneer of snow that together form one of many visual motifs in Matthew Rankin's superbly dry dramedy Universal Language. A large part of the film's delights come from...
Friday One Sheet: PÁRVULOS
After featuring a number of key art that left the standard credit block out the design, it is nice to see this poster from Mexico's festival darling coming-of-age plague-zombie film, Párvulos, has a more traditional sense, where they are tucked...
Friday One Sheet: THE BRUTALIST
Typography is no stranger to the design of Brady Corbet's "Monumental" new film, The Brutalist. The credits in both the film, and its recent trailer, do interesting things. This carries into this iconic poster, with the Statue of Liberty upside...
Friday One Sheet: THE ORDER
I am generally indifferent to collage style posters, particularly when designers transitioned from hand-painted to photoshop. However, I do admire the commitment to verticality taken by design house, Fable, for Justin Kurzel's neo-nazi procedural, The Order. The pull quotes, the above...
Friday One Sheet: SHARP CORNER Teaser
This will be a short one today, with this minimalist teaser for Jason Buxton's dark character study, Sharp Corner. A family man (Ben Foster) becomes obsessed with saving the lives of the car accident victims on the sharp corner in front...
Friday One Sheet: DEAD MAIL
Delightfully low-fi and textured, the key art for Joe DeBoer's and Kyle McConaghy's Dead Mail not only is a great reflection of the analog style of the film, but also offers a significant amount of information about the plot. The...
Friday One Sheet: GULIZAR
A simple, melancholy image forms most of the design for the key art of Belkis Bayrak's Gülizar. A woman in a car presses her hands up to the glass, eyes downcast, as if saying goodbye to her world for the last...
Toronto 2024 Review: RELAY, Propulsive Paranoid Tradecraft
There is one line of dialogue repeated, over and over in Relay, like a mantra: “Go ahead.” It is spoken by nearly every major character as they communicate through anonymous telephone operators, to preserve each other's privacy. This aspect alone makes for a...
Friday One Sheet: HARD TRUTHS
Faces go a long way in poster; there is a wonderful pairing here. The design for Mike Leigh's latest film (premiering today at TIFF) uses text, both the soft yellow of the title, as well as above the line and...
Toronto 2024 Curtain Raiser: Curating the Weirder Movies of Toronto's Mammoth Festival
The Toronto International Film Festival, now in its 49th year, was called the Festival of Festivals prior to just being shortened down to its four letter acronym, TIFF. The festival still is adhering to its original mandate of...
Midnight Dankness: Toronto's LoFi Remix Unofficial TIFF Pre-Game Hang
It was 2021 and most film festivals, big or small, were in an online only model. Perhaps due to its late summer sweet spot, The Toronto International Film festival managed a soft-hybrid, with a significantly reduced number of films, some of...
