Tag: shortfilm
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...
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...
Fantasia 2025 Short Film, Short Review: BARLEBAS
Shot in lush and misty black & white, with superbly framed large-canvas photography, and truly exceptional production design, Malu Janssen’s Barlebas is a 20-minute short of a literal witch-hunt. One which perfectly balances the epic and the intimate, the tender and...
Fantasia 2025 Short Film, Short Review: LE TOUR DE CANADA
Fuelled by strong beer, broken glass, and raw fish, John Hollands' Le Tour De Canada is a frenetic race from St. John’s to Vancouver somewhere in an alternate 1970s - if the chroma keyed backdrops of Toronto are to be trusted, or...
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: 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: 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...
Friday One Sheet: LITTLE HAITI, MIAMI, USA
We have featured the work of L.A. designer Tori Huynh in the pages previously for Rielle Li's short film Penny Pinched. Her latest design is another short film, Little Haiti, Miami, USA. Here, using architecture, shadows, and sky, she underscores the...
Fantasia 2023 Review: THE TASTER, Harbinger of a Bold New Voice
Some time in the near future, the climate crisis, and the resulting extreme water and food shortages, have put Europe into a state of war. What little healthy land that remains lies along Danube Delta in Romania which is hotly...
Friday One Sheet: PENNY PINCHED
This wonderfully minimalist key art, for Kat Cayton G's avant garde short Penny Pinched, was designed by LA illustrator (and podcaster) Tori Huynh. With falling tennis balls (one on a string for some reason) on a sky-blue field above, prone...
Friday One Sheet: KILL OR BE KILLED
It is all about the vertical text here. This dark key art is for a Devin Teer's short film about loyalty and morality, and depicts duplicates digging at dusk. It stands out because of that killer (sorry) title card with...
Friday One Sheet: WHEN WE DANCED
I know precious little about Ryan Moore's film, When We Danced, other than that it recently played in the Philippines Short Program at the Asian World Film Festival. That being said, The Robot Eye, the design house who did the...
Friday One Sheet: SINGLE MOTHER
The key art for Lenara Serazheva's short film, Single Mother, offers a stark, simple image that conveys a lot with a little. Reminiscent of the classic scene from Kon Satoshi's Perfect Blue, which was later appropriated by Darren Aronofsky in...
Friday One Sheet: SHE'S MINE NOW
Here is a handsome, minimalist, poster. Was it Godard who said, "All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun"? Clearly, he overlooked the cute little purse dog, and besides: domestic animals are good for one's...
Friday One Sheet: EL SEMBLANTE
The poster for Raúl Cerezo and Carlos Moriana's short film, El Semblante, has the character of an unearthed Renaissance-era tome. With its distressed Arabesque border design, it also feels like a moveable-type printed document, stamped with a red-inked Spanish Inquisition...
Calgary Underground 2022 Short Film Short Review: CORNERS, A Bespoke Deadpan
Rory is a thorough man in a lackadaisical world. In the near future, Canada, and possibly the world has implemented a thorough set of guidelines for inspection and health of the corners of public buildings. Rory takes his job...
Toronto 2021 Short Film, Short Review: DUST BATH
I am cognizant of the fact that it might take you longer to read this review than to watch the one hundred and twenty seconds of this animated short involving chickens searching for scratch, and philosophizing on the circle of...
Friday One Sheet: THE MOHEL
Here is the key art for a Canadian short playing at SXSW that at first glance evokes the iconic poster imagery of The Exorcist. Charles Wahl's The Mohel, however, is about a Jewish doctor arriving to do the circumcision of...
Friday One Sheet: DRACULA SEX TAPE
Olivier Godin's short film, Dracula Sex Tape, is a 5-minute burst of high-energy dialogue and smoking. It is like inhaling Richard Linklater's Slacker, in a single intense drag that leaves one light-headed and satisfied simultaneously. The short, which debuted at Woche...
