THE TALE OF SILYAN Review: Astonishingly Precise Visual Storytelling
The myth that I have always associated with storks is that of them delivering babies via the chimneys of Europeans. I remember vividly the first time I drove through the Romanian countryside and saw a nest on every post, and...
Friday One Sheet: RELAPSE
Sometimes, all you need for an effective piece of key art is a well lit photo and a generous bit of negative space. Frost Foundry's poster for Paul Boyd's live-streaming drug addiction rock and roll drama, Relapse, is just that....
Screen Anarchists On Guillermo del Toro's FRANKENSTEIN
While Guillermo del Toro's adaptation of Frankenstein passed me by during its limited theatrical run, it sure arrived on Netflix pretty fast. I checked it out, discussed it with colleagues, and noticed there were many different opinions on it,...
Friday One Sheet: MAGELLAN
The majestic ode to the age of exploration and sail show in today's key art belies the revisionist historical film from slow cinema maestro Lav Diaz. With its hazy sunrise and high grain, and jaunty tilt (note the waterline, and...
SISU: ROAD TO REVENGE Review: Worse Things Than Death. Unleash Hell. And So Forth.
Jorrma Tommila and Stephen Lang battle to the death in Jalmari Helander's pulverizing action thriller.
Friday One Sheet: TRAIN DREAMS
Here is a lovely hand-drawn poster from design house Grandson, and artist Sally Deng, for Clint Bentley's Train Dreams, which illustrates one of the films central images: work boots nailed to a tree, a potent visual metaphor for the manifest destiny...
Friday One Sheet: ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER
Seizing on the final 'set-piece' of Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, French designer Melanie Danna created this alternate poster for the film, with the title text highlighting the 'bumps in the road', as it were. Also note the...
Friday One Sheet: CRIME 101
After the opening credits and marketing from HBO's True Detective, the silhouette/landscape design trope became fairly ubiquitous in movie posters. Noteworthy that the key art for Denis Villeneuve's criminally under seen Enemy kind of got there first. I am generally...
Toronto After Dark 2025 Review: SISU: ROAD TO REVENGE Really Really Really Loves Blowing Up Commies
After the epic Western-Thunderdome Nazi-killing smorgasbord that was Sisu, Finnish director Jalmari Helander returns to his large northern Europe canvas for another round of battle with Finland’s enemies. This time, it's in the key of Mad Max: Fury Road, against an...
Toronto After Dark 2025 Short Film Short Review: CLOWN SONG Is A Banger
The sinister clown is a timeless trope of cinema and pulp horror and real life - from David Lynch to Rob Zombie, Álex de la Iglesia to Bobcat Goldthwait, and Stephen King to John Wayne Gacy. Taking the ever-loving piss...
Toronto After Dark 2025 Review: THE OCCUPANT OF THE ROOM, Chills and Melancholy in The Swiss Alps
Seen wandering through the grim fog and pale moonlit wilderness of the Swiss Alps as a tiny speck among the trees and rocks, a man (Don McKellar) reaches his isolated hotel destination only to find there are no rooms available...
Toronto After Dark 2025 Review: PRIMATE, A Lean and Mean Creature Feature
“Who keeps a chimpanzee as a pet?” muses an unsuspecting, blandly attractive 20-something party-boy, right before he has his face ripped off, quite graphically, for daring to ask such a question about the movie he has found himself in. First...
Friday One Sheet: BUGONIA
Have we featured key art from pretty much every Yorgos Lanthimos film since this column's inception? Probably. The work of designer Vasilis Marmatakis is always striking, and his inclination towards verticality always captures my attention. For Bugonia, a loose remake...
Friday One Sheet: AMONG THE PINES (DANS LES PINS)
Debuting this week in the short-film competition at Montreal's Festival Du Nouveau Cinéma, is a film from ScreenAnarchy's own Canadian Editor, Shelagh Rowan-Legg. Dans Les Pins plays out via letters read aloud, in which a young woman tells of her job at...
Friday One Sheet: EUROPE'S NEW FACES
A smoking vessel on an open sea. A literal and metaphoric image dominates the key art for Sam Abbas' documentary, Europe's New Faces, or "An observation of the migrant experience: From crossing the Mediterranean Sea to settling in Paris-based squats."...
SCARED SHITLESS Review: A Great Time at the Movies
Steven Ogg and Daniel Doheny star in the horror comedy. Vivieno Caldinelli directed.
Friday One Sheet: SHE LOVED BLOSSOMS MORE
The poster for Greek horror science-fiction hazy tale of unexplored grief, She Loved Blossoms More, has worthy-weird poster, with slime-green text, and a textured background of dried and oxidized blood. And of course, the key and central image of the...
Toronto After Dark Rises from the Ashes With A Full 2025 Edition!
After the tragic passing of its founder and most enthusiastic showman, Adam Lopez, from a long (and frankly inspiring) battle with cancer, like a phoenix from the ashes, the Toronto After Dark Film Festival returns in 2025 as a tribute...
Friday One Sheet: COPPER
This highly unusual poster instantly communicates that it is for a highly unusual film. Completely at odds with the look of the film (which is dust and tan) or the title of the film, Copper, the washed out blue looks...
Toronto 2025 Review: FRANKENSTEIN, Guillermo del Toro's Handsome, Empathetic Monster
“Can you contain your fire, Prometheus, or will you burn your hands?” The line is spoken by Christoph Waltz’s polymath gentlemen of curiosities, a 19th century military-industrial baron who got rich off the Crimean War, and whose hobbies get in...
