REVIEWS

Fantastic Fest Review: Andre Ovredal's Awesome 'Troll Hunter'

Trolls! It's a premise that could very easily come off campy and without any sincerity at all. The thought of a found footage film about hunting trolls in the forests and mountains of Norway could work against the film. It could illicit laughter from the audience, as ideas of Harry Potter or Gandalf saving the day might fill their distracted heads from what is playing out in the film before them.

Thankfully, with Troll Hunter, director Andre Ovredal has achieved the extremely difficult. He has made up the idea of trolls living out in the wild, he has taken that myth that is so instilled in his own, Norwegian

Fantastic Fest Review: Adam Green's Gutsy Sequel 'Hatchet II'

Both Victor Crowley and the notion of horror franchising are still alive and well. When we last saw Crowley - the mutated ghost with a penchant for ripping people's heads open of Hatchet fame - he was pulling young Marybeth, the heroine of the first film, out of a lake by her hair. As with any decent horror sequel, this is precisely the moment we're thrown in at the start of Adam Green's Hatchet II. Luckily for Marybeth, now played by Danielle Harris, as well as the producers behind the Hatchet franchise, she escapes and becomes a survivor who then takes a team back into the woods to finish Crowley off once and for all.

Fantastic Fest Review: Kim Ji-Woon's Confident 'I Saw the Devil'

Those Koreans and their brutal acts of vengeance. Over the course of the past few years, the revenge film has become a staple in the South Korean film market with Park Chan-wook's Vengeance trilogy (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance) leading the pack in terms of quality and style.

One of the latest films in this subgenre to come out of South Korea (I say "one of the latest" as this notion of Korean revenge was delivered at Fantastic Fest in spades) comes to us from Kim Ji-woon, the exciting and visionary director of A Tale of Two Sisters, Bittersweet Life and The Good, the Bad, the Weird. The film,

Jeremy's Fantastic Fest Review: Miguel Angel Vivas' Kidnapped

A feature length film told in a total of twelve, long-winding shots. That was the main parameter Spanish director Miguel Angel Vivas set before himself in making his newest horror-thriller film Kidnapped (also known as Secuestrados originally in Spanish). Telling a rather basic story within a somewhat basic setting is one way of handling this challenge, and that is precisely what Vivas has done with this film. Kidnapped, for all of its grand conceptual staging and near flawless execution, ends up failing to resonate as a narrative, and, unfortunately, Vivas underlying idea in the story he has set out to tell becomes a gimmick in the end.

Fantastic Fest Review: Quentin Dupieux's Anomalous 'Rubber'

No reason. That's a safe moniker to throw at your audience, particularly when your film is about a rubber tire named Robert with a taste for blood. This is the general premise behind Rubber, the new French film from Quentin Dupieux (aka Mr. Oizo), that opens up the idea that anything goes right at the beginning. As Stephen Spinella's Lieutenant Chad explains to us in the film's opening monologue, questioning what you are about to see is as inane as asking why E.T. is brown. No reason. Why did the people in Texas Chainsaw Massacre never wash their hands? No reason. If trivial questions like those can be viewed as meaningless

Fantastic Fest Review: Yoshihiro Nakamura's 'Golden Slumber'

"Once there was a way to get back home..." I love seeing films at Fantastic Fest that I don't know anything about going in, yet walk out loving. Yoshihiro Nakamura's Golden Slumber is one of those films, and one that I can honestly say I truly loved. It's quite long, running over two hours, but it's a great story that kept me intrigued as it continued to relentlessly push forward. The story follows Aoyagi (Masato Sakai), a humble delivery man from Sendai, Japan, who suddenly ends up framed for the assassination of the Prime Minister and sets off on the run from the cops. It's a smart, amusing, captivating thriller that I'm so glad I got to see.

Jeremy's Fantastic Fest Review: Mother's Day - It's Just Awful

There could be a decent film scrapped together in all that Darren Lynn Bousman shot for the remake of Mother's Day. As one of the benefits of seeing a film with a Q&A after, you realize the potential a film has even before it is released to mass audiences. In the Q&A at Fantastic Fest, Bousman explained that there was also five-hour cut of the film, one that we obviously did not see and one that will obviously not be shown to the public. It should be noted at this time that this first paragraph is not part of my review, but more an explanation that what I saw may not be what you will be seeing when Mother's Day gets its release next

Jeremy's Fantastic Fest Review: Let Me In - A Beautiful Tribute

Let Me In, the Matt Reeves-written/directed retelling of John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel originally known as Let the Right One In, is beautiful, gripping, and terrifying. It is a powerful story of one boy's isolation from the world and the creature that comes into his life to accept him. From the way Reeves adapts the story to the way it's executed, there is so much to appreciate in this film, yet there is a difficult feeling to shake.

Let Me In is not only another retelling of Lindqvist's novel, it is a remake of the 2008 Swedish film, which was adapted to the screen by Lindqvist himself and directed by Tomas Alfredson. While Let Me In cannot be

Rodrigo Cortés Delivers a Box Full of Suspense with 'Buried'

The frustration of bullshit bureaucracy has slowly taken over quality customer service and logical assistance from the corporations and organizations that provide our most basic services. It's hard to believe, but in Rodrigo Cortés' Buried the familiar  long-winded customer service call is a matter of life or death for Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds), a truck driver for military supplies in Iraq who has woken up to find himself buried alive with only a cell phone, a Zippo lighter, glowsticks, a shitty flashlight and all odds against him. As I found myself inside the wooden coffin from a theater in downtown Chicago, I was on the edge of my seat until the very end. Read on!

Toronto Review: Tom Hooper's Exceptional 'The King's Speech'

What an exhilarating way to end the festival! My last film of TIFF 2010 was the recently crowned Audience Award winner The King's Speech from director Tom Hooper and damn does it ever deserve that award. I had no clue what to expect going in, and was a bit nervous, but it's one of those wonderful films that in the first few minutes already had me thinking to myself "I'm going to love this." And indeed I did, and that says a lot, as a period piece drama is not usually something I go for. I'm going to make a bold statement - I think The King's Speech is on par with Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan as one of the very best movies of the year.

Video Review & Discussion: The Dowdle Bros' Thriller 'Devil'

I decided to see the Dowdle Brothers' new film Devil, produced and conceived by M. Night Shyamalan, this weekend as I thought the concept was quite intriguing and I was very curious to check it out. I actually enjoyed it, maybe because I'm a sucker for these kind of concepts and Shyamalan's dark, twisted stories, but it wasn't perfect by any means, especially the screenplay itself, which was actually written by Brian Nelson (of Hard Candy, 30 Days of Night). I really wanted to discuss my feelings on the film after, so I recorded a video blog with Jordan Raup from The Film Stage talking about Devil that you can watch directly below.

Toronto Review: Jim Mickle's Vampire Road Film 'Stake Land'

I think I found my favorite Midnight Madness film of 2010. Vampires have become an overused, cliched and tired "villain" in genre flicks recently, but that doesn't mean an indie gem can't come along and prove that a great vampire flick can be dark, bloody, and badass once again, and that's exactly what Stake Land does. The best way to describe this would be to say it's like The Road, but not as bleak, and with a vampire epidemic being the cause of the apocalypse. That's an odd reference, but it's exactly what this is like, as it follows a vampire killer and his teen protege as they travel North to "New Eden" fending off nasty vamps.

Toronto Review: Janus Metz's Incredible War Doc 'Armadillo'

I'm not normally a big documentary guy, so I don't see many of them over the course of a year, but I'd heard some great things about a Danish doc called Armadillo that won the top prize in the Semaine de la Critique (Critics' Week) sidebar in Cannes earlier this year. I finally saw this documentary in Toronto and damn is it good, it's pretty much as incredible as you've likely heard, but not perfect. Armadillo is a documentary that follows a platoon of Danish soldiers on a six month tour to a front line army base in Afghanistan in the war against the Taliban in early 2009. It's intense and emotional and, yes I'll say it, better than The Hurt Locker.

Review: Life and Art Commingle in the Documentary 'Catfish'

I implore you not to read this review for Catfish if you have not yet seen the film. Skip down to the bottom and glance at my rating if you want to know my underlying opinion of the film. It's not that I'm going to get into any major spoilers; I would never do that, not even for something as prefigured as Titanic. However, there are certain films that must be seen fresh, that need to be experienced without the slightest inclination as to what's going to happen. Often times our preconceived notions lead to overblown expectations of a film, especially one with a back half as open as in Catfish. But let's get to the front before we move to the back.