Festivals Features
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...
Friday One Sheet: ANYWHERE ANYTIME
Anywhere Anytime, pays homage to Vittorio De Sica’s post-war poverty classic, The Bicycle Thief, but updated to the modern delivery economy. Like the stripped down cinéma vérité of that film, which nearly single-handedly created a new aesthetic of storytelling on film, the...
Locarno 2024: King of Bollywood Shah Rukh Khan on Global Stardom, Brad Pitt´s Jaw and the Power of Female Directors
Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan reflects on the serendipitous journey from a young boy mesmerized by Yash Chopra's films to becoming one of Bollywood's most celebrated stars, all while maintaining a humble, grounded approach to stardom.
Friday One Sheet: ANOTHER END
The second poster for Piero Messina's Another End features two lovers sleeping towards each other, almost touching hands, on an 'endless' bed of beige. For me, it evokes the key art for Atom Egoyan's 1997 Canadian masterpiece, The Sweet Hereafter. The...
Fantasia 2024 Wrap: What We Saw, Liked, and Loved
From July 18 through August 4, 2024, the centre of our genre-film loving world moved to Montreal, Canada, where the Fantasia International Film Festival unveiled a broad and diverse selection of films from around the world, as they have done,...
Friday One Sheet: THE SECOND
This beautiful watercolour poster for Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos's The Second is hiding a subtle secret in plain sight. The short film centres around a pistols-at-dawn kind of duel, and the underlying complexity of motivations across two generations. The lead...
Friday One Sheet: TATSUMI
I remain ever a fan of taking a compelling still frame form the film itself, and composing it into key art. Below is the poster for Yakuza drama, Tatsumi, in which leads Yûya Endô and Kokoro Morita offer each other...
Fantasia 2024: Let Us Raise the Curtain on North America's Largest Genre Festival
The 28th Fantasia International Film Festival runs from July 18 to August 4 in a hot hot hot Montreal. For those of us located in North America, it is one of our favourite times of the year. Due to its...
Friday One Sheet: FAYE
Lounging by the pool in a silk robe and stiletto heels at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 1977, actress and style icon, Faye Dunaway is shown in a kind of Sunset Boulevard-esque tableaux the morning after she won the Academy Award...
Tribeca 2024: What We Saw, Liked, and Loved
From June 5-16, 2024, the center of our genre-film loving world moved to New York, New York, where the Tribeca Festival unveiled a broad and diverse selection of films from around the world. Our contributors Olga Artemyeva, Martin Tsai and...
Friday One Sheet: INFINITE SUMMER
Pink and Grey is the new Orange and Teal. The new film from the strange brain of Miguel Llansó, Infinite Summer, will premiere at Montreal's Fantasia film festival later this summer, however in advance of this, we have this love...
Tribeca 2024 Dispatch: International Narrative Competition, Slices of Family Life, Sometimes Melancholy, More Often Miserable
Family life usually provokes strong, personal reactions, either positive or negative. In the case of the films in the International Narrative Competition at the 2024 Tribeca Festival, family life exerts a powerful influence upon the narrative in the 10 films...
Tribeca 2024 Preview: Raise the Curtain, See These Movies
Get ready, New York, for a bounty of indie and international bangers. Arising from the ashes of the 2001 terrorist attack on New York City, the Tribeca Festival has long established itself on the annual calendar as a home for...
Friday One Sheet: THE SUBSTANCE
This buzzy body horror picture out of Cannes, is the sophomore feature from Coralie Fargeat, whose blood-splattered Revenge was a hit on the festival circuit in 2017. The Substance had a much more disturbing and visceral bit of key art, one that seems to...
Friday One Sheet: IN A VIOLENT NATURE
This gritty poster for Chris Nash's original and disturbing slasher film was designed by The Boland Design Company, and unironically features the word "gnarly" in the top pull quote. When designing a poster for a slasher (or for that matter,...
Friday One Sheet: THE LAST STOP IN YUMA COUNTY
This cream-coloured, coffee focused, exercise in minimalism and symbolism is for the tight, one location 'bag of money' suspense thriller The Last Stop in Yuma County. I have no idea why, but i wish more designers would put the title...
