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...
Fantasia 2024 Review: GHOST CAT ANZU, Farts in the General Direction of Studio Ghibli
To the sounds of cicadas during a Tokyo summer, 11-year-old Karin and her father Tetsuya leave the city by train to visit a countryside temple where the caretaker is the grandfather she has never met. It is a grand old...
Fantasia 2024: SINCOPAT, Short Film Short Review
During the opening credits of short film, Sincopat, many festival laurels are initially displayed onscreen. Then, following a loud ‘bang’ on the soundtrack, several dozen more appear. This is a first for me, but it is in sync with the...
Fantasia 2024 Review: SCARED SHITLESS, A Creature Feature Worth Taking The Plunge
A friend of mine, an astute and well travelled film-lover, once told me their ‘big theory’ of audience engagement for most movies: The viewer will like the movie more if the main character is simply good at doing their job....
Fantasia 2024 Review: TATSUMI, A Gritty Yakuza Street Drama With A Broken Heart
I am happy that these kinds of gritty, but emotionally tragic crime films are still being made. Hiroshi Shôji’s Tatsumi is one of those skuzzy neighborhood dramas, the kind soaked in poverty, spit, blood, and tears. Where the crime feels...
Fantasia 2024: THE SECOND, Short Film Short Review
Editor Tony Zhou and Illustrator Taylor Ramos are perhaps best known for their YouTube channel Every Frame A Painting, their video essay side-hustle away from their day jobs in the TV animation industry. Early pioneers in this space nearly...
Fantasia 2024 Review: 4PM, Where the Social Contract Is Weaponized
Jay Song’s two-hour implosion of the social contract, 4PM is delightfully frustrating, and terribly absurd. It is loosely based on the Belgian novel The Stranger Next Door, written by Francophone author Amélie Nothomb, and plays as if that scene from ‘The Burbs —...
Fantasia 2024 Review: BOOKWORM, A Parenting Adventure In The Wilderness
Early on in Bookworm, a doctor struggles to have a conversation with a child about her injured mother. The medical professional tries to ease the child’s anxiety and kind of makes a fool of himself, because the young girl just...
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: RED ISLAND
When you have a film as gorgeously composed and framed as one by Robin Campillo (120 BPM), and set in one of the most beautiful places on earth (Madagascar), one of the best practices is to simply use a frame...
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...
ScreenAnarchy's Top 10 Films Of The First Half Of 2024
The last six months of 2024 contain two more days than the first six do (courtesy of February, even in a leap year as this one...), so we could stretch it a day, but now there's no avoiding it any...
DADDIO Review: Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn, Sitting in a Cab, Talking
Writer/director Christy Hall's film is a two-hander starring Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn.
Friday One Sheet: LONGLEGS (Again)
Perhaps the best movie marketing effort of 2024, at least via its posters, has been for Osgoode Perkins' soon to be released Longlegs. We have always been ardent admirers of design house GrandSon, and, quite simply put, they have been...
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...
Friday One Sheet: MAD MAX & THE FURY ROAD
With the underwhelming box office of the latest film in the decade spanning Mad Max franchise, Furiosa, there may be no more of these wonderful, experimental, and auteur-driven action films made. That is a shame. But we can dream. As...
Friday One Sheet: MAXXXINE
Three entries in, and Ti West's horror-porno hybrid franchise (X, Pearl, Maxxxine) knows that its secret weapon is Mia Goth's "uncanny-valley" smile. This poster leans into it fully, with the Hollywood stage lights, the glossy glamour of the design referencing...
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,...
