Fantasia 2025.08: "Methuselah", A Grand Mockery, Every Heavy Thing, The House with Laughing Windows, "Things That Go Bump in the East", and I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn

This day started early:

3:30am, to be precise, with the alarm right in the room, rather than just the hallway. I don't know what it was about - I just headed out and tried not to bother the firefighters who showed up impressively quickly - but I'm glad it wasn't serious. This is a twelve-story building with 10 rooms on my floor, and there were not 100 people milling about afterward. Maybe it's just usually filled with college students and mostly-empty for the summer (there are about a dozen keyboxes for AirBNB rentals and brokers showing it to prospective tenants locked to the front steps, and that doesn't even include me), but I have a hard time imagining the folks who sleep through that din or say, man, that's a lot of stairs, maybe I'll evacuate when I smell smoke or firefighters pull me out.

So, it was almost 4am by the time I got to bed, which is just shy of the line where I usually say it's not worth going back to sleep. My body was going to wake me up at 8am or so anyway, though, and I wound up dragging something fierce for most of the day. It didn't help that most of the afternoon programming was from the Underground section and I'm not really a giallo guy, so I wound up dozing off or zoning out until the shorts package in the evening.

I mean, after "Methuselah" by Nathan Sellers; his short was 4 minutes long and pretty darn strong. Obviously, Justine was not really looking at my giant lens-covering finger in disdain (why Samsung designed this phone so that ones finger naturally rests there whne using the buttons to snap a picture is beyond me).

On the other hand, Adam C. Briggs and Sam Dixon made a movie that was often dark and grainy and very easy to zone out to, so I missed some the film, their Q&A gave the impression that Brisbane is not exactly an Australian hive of creative expression, but it was a scene where everybody sort of knows each other, and they wound up working together, if in unfamiliar roles at times.

Mickey Reese and Josh Fadem were really "on" in their intro and Q&A for Every Heavy Thing. I dig the energy which I didn't have, and that Reese wrote it for Fadem, who had played over a hundred supporting roles but never had a lead, so this was made with him in mind, and pretty much the entire cast. I suppose, as with Brisbane, when you're making movies in Oklahoma City, you know who you're working with.

After that, it was The House with Laughing Windows, and, as I say below, I am just not a giallo guy.

At some point after that, though, the caffeine kicked in or something, or maybe the "Things That Go Bump in the East" selections were just more my speed. Here we've got our moderator (Xige Li?), "Mom, Stay Dead" director Lee Na-hee, programmer/translator Steven Lee, "Dhet!" composer Dameer Khan, and "Red Spider Lilies: The Ascension" co-star/producer Eriko Nakamura & director Koji Shiraishi. As you can see, it was a pretty fun session, with Lee talking about how her short was inspired by how her mother actually blossomed once she finally moved out of the house, gaining a bunch of new hobbies and creating art, which got her thinking about how there are a lot of movies about how children grow at times like this but not necessarily parents.

Khan, meanwhile, is local to Montreal, representing "Dhet!" since director Ummid Ashraf had visa issues. There seemed to be more trouble with visas this year then I remember being a case before, although that could just be random variation. It does demonstrate how even relatively small-scale shorts like this have international collaborators, and Khan talked about how the giant highways the protagonist is traveling make Dhaka a very loud city, so the music had to be layered and a bit discordant, enough so that when it is suddenly quiet, the eeriness of it really hits.

If you look at IMDB, "Red Spider Lilies" is listed as "Pilot Version", and Eriko Nakamura said that, yes, they were very much looking do something more with it. I hope they do; it's a fun premise! She also mentioned that she was in another film at Fantasia this year, Dollhouse, but also not to go see it on her account because it wasn't really one of her great acting roles.

Finally, I made it across the street to Hall, where this is sort of the best picture I got of the surprisingly big contingent for I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn: Writer/director Kenichi Ugana plus actors Lissa Cranadang-Sweeney, Rocko Zevenbergen, Madeline Barbush, Estevan Muñoz, Ui Mihara, and Katsunari Nakagawa. One thing Mihara mentioned is that she felt a lot like her character going into the movie: If you look at her IMDB page, she seems to be have done an episode of TV every week or so for the past couple years, and felt pretty darn burnt out before doing this one. Though she maybe could have done without the amount of gross things she had to put in her mouth to spit out.


That's the start of Week Two on Wednesday the 23rd; Thursday would be Redux Redux, The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, Anna Kiri, and my first go at Transcending Dimensions. Today (Saturday the 2nd), my plans are Foreigner, Circo Animato, Mononoke II, and Queens of the Dead. The School Duel and The Virgin of the Quarry Lake are pretty good.


"Methuselah"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP):
:
A poem of a short film, using striking words and imagery to how trees are both dynamic and static features of nature - always growing but persisting for centuries in some cases - and how too many have been used by humans as sites for hangings and lynchings, tainting them forever. The narration by Jordan Mullins walks a line between reverence and rage, and the images from filmmaker Nathan Sellers manage to emphasize the evil men do with these marvelous things.


A Grand Mockery

* * ½-ish (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)

A Grand Mockery is engrossing for as long as it feels like an 8mm pseudo-documentary, but as soon as it tries to consciously be transgressive or experimental, it starts to get a bit tiresome. The filmmakers have vision, but it's not necessarily clear.

It follows "Josie" (Sam Dixon), initially seen walking through a Brisbane cemetery, seemingly one of the few green spots in the city and a sort of postal network where folks leave messages and meet up. There's not much going in the city - things are cool with his girlfriend, the father he tends to is mostly non-responsive, and his job at a cinema involves either cleaning up the disgusting messes customers leave behind or trying to handle their obstinacy. It wears on him, both physically and in the increasingly unhinged notes from possibly-imaginary correspondents.

The wear doesn't really kick in for audiences until the film's final scenes; up until then, even the moments when it approaches the grotesque and despairing feel immediate and earnest, the portrait of a man in a place where his artistic instincts seemingly can't take him anywhere, the cemetery seemingly the only source of tranquility. There are drugs and drink accelerating it, but one mostly sees a situation where folks get ground down because there's no seeming mobility. Josie doesn't necessarily seem inclined to make a living out of his drawings and the like, but they go unshared and he seems to have no other avenue to express himself to others.

The finale, though, is just endless. The filmmakers are good at sneaking up on the audience for a while, Josie's increasingly scraggly hair hiding how some health issue is distorting his face until he winds up in a strange bar that may only bear a passing connection with reality. At that point the movie starts banging on past any point it could be making, drawing out its grotesquerie until Josie is a drunken, distorted mess. Fair enough, I guess - that's arguably where lives of quiet desperation wind up - but after a while the filmmakers have eroded a lot of the goodwill the film had earned.

It goes on a bit as he gets outside the city, and the green of the woods and swamp seems like a bookend to the cemetery at the start (8mm green seems like a very specific color), and for a bit I wondered if it was intentional, starting in a city graveyard and ending outside the city in a place dense with life, but, apparently, the decay is too strong at this point, and the film trundles on until it ends in a whimper.


Every Heavy Thing

* * ¼-ish (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

I'm mostly giving this a pass, because even though I didn't doze off much, I feel like I missed a lot of pieces that were important to the story.

It starts out conventionally enough, with a Scream-style pre-credits murder before introducing the audience to Joe (Josh Fadem), who sells ads for the local alt-weekly, one of the last in the country, reluctantly accompanying a friend to a show - he and wife Lux (Tipper Newton) seem to have separate social lives - only to enjoy it more than expected, and see the singer get murdered. Killer William Shaffer (James Urbaniak) says he's going to let Joe live because it amuses him, but it will amuse him much less if Joe does anything stupid. Like helping the paper's new writer (Kaylene Snarsky) when she has leads on the disappearance William is responsible for.

The problem in a nutshell is that the story really doesn't have any place to go after William reveals himself, about ten ten minutes into the movie; Joe winds up in this holding pattern but it plays more like awkward social situations rather than walls closing in or real danger. Writer/director Mickey Reese puts in other threads - Shaffer as the vanguard of various tech companies moving their operations to the city, an old friend (Vera Drew) returning to town after her transition, various family concerns - but none of them seem ironically more urgent than the man who is murdering women and apparently disposing of the bodies very well, which isn't presented as a big deal itself versus how it puts a man in an uncomfortable situation.

Plus, the jokes are only about half as funny as the writers seem to think. It gets by on volume for a while, and Tipper Newton is maybe the film's most valuable asset as Lux, seeming to put a weird and amusing spin on just about everything. After a while, though, things just aren't that funny, and the film made in part to give Josh Fadem a lead role after a lot of character work winds up showing why he hasn't been cast in one before: He's affable and has pleasant chemistry with almost everyone else, but it highlights him as a glue guy in a cast the way Joe is in his community, but maybe not with the sort of charisma that puts him at the center of a story.

One admires the attempt that this sort of outside-of-Hollywood indie is making. Unfortunately, it seems too committed to a twist that seems inspired at first but goes nowhere.


La casa dalle finestre che ridono (The House with Laughing Windows)

* * ½-ish (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Retro, laser DCP)
Order the old DVD at Amazon

I've probably posted some variation of this before, but I think I'm just not a giallo person. No matter the extent to which the director is regarded as a master, or how sexy the cast is, or how shocking or lurid the twists are, I just don't get drawn in, and The House with the Laughing Walls was not an exception to this rule. Like so many things in the genre, it falls in that gap between intriguing mysteries and unnerving horror for me.

(In fairness, all the films this afternoon suffered from my sleep being interrupted the night before, so I wasn't absorbing as much as I'd like.)

It feels like it should be a little more intriguing than it is, with an art expert (Lino Capolicchio) arriving to restore a church's peculiar painting, mysterious disappearances, and secretive villagers, but the film is too arch for much of its running time. Stefano doesn't really feel like anything, drifting through the story as strange things happen around him, not particularly defining himself as an academic or artist, and there seems to be an opportunity missed in using the restoration as a thing to hand the story and investigation on, where immersing himself in this artist's life and techniques draws him closer to the man's demons. Even with a new restoration, everything feels pre-faded, like there's never been any life to the story to start with. The mystery feels too distant.

It gets crazy toward the end, even audaciously so, but maybe it's a problem of genre-awareness, where knowing something is a giallo means that one is awaiting rather than dreading the inevitable, and the finale is surprising just because it's random rather than lying in wait to blindside a viewer. Sure, okay, the sisters are messed up, but not in a way that has anything to do with what Stefano has experienced, so it's not resonating.


"Magai-Gami"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

"Magai-Gami" has a pretty darn basic premise - folks in a scary place investigating an urban legend come face to face with monsters that will kill them if they look away - but it executes exceptionally well: Leads Ion Obata and Nagisa Toriumi are a fun pairing even as most of their banter is done over the phone, and the audience picks upon their dynamic very quickly even as the movie starts with them already on the ground. Mostly, the monsters are kind of great, feeling like a mix of visual effects and practical work that capture the freaky images of old illustrations while not looking more out of place next to a girl in a puffer jacket talking on a cell phone than a more modern design would.

Filmmaker Norihiro Niwatsukino doesn't have a particularly long résumé, but he seems very assured here, keeping the film moving even when it involves standing still, displaying a good handle on using what his effects team gives him, and setting up a supernatural-containment mythology in the closing minute or two that doesn't feel too much like it's trying to impress with how clever it is. The program guide describe the short as a proof-of-concept, and, yes, I'd like to see more.


"Ba Dong Yao" ("Hungry")

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

Taiwanese puppet fantasy adventure is one of the best bits of any Fantasia Festival that contains it - I've rearranged schedules to make it work - and it was a really delightful surprise to see it show up in the middle of what initially looked like an animated short. It's a good animated short - it's got a strong style and a story about an ailing kid and his busy father in the middle of a festival that spans the traditional and the modern - but the live-action puppets means this film zigs where one expects it to zag, making his fever dreams feel a bit more real in the moment than his actual world even as they're clearly mythic.

Oh, and bonkers, as these goddesses fight to become his mother and the puppet combat is a kick to watch, fully embracing the capabilities and limitations of what these things can do, especially with a little FX work to eliminate rods and strings. It's great fun that leads into neat music and a satisfying finale.


"Mati Adat" ("Kill Tradition")

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

Compared to the others, "Kill Tradition" is a nifty slow-burner of a short, keeping just what the stakes are on the horizon as it builds the relationship between Idah (Nik Waheeda), the sort of precocious kid that gets into trouble, and her recently-widowed mother Iman (Ezzar Nurzhaffira) as they prepare a meal for an upcoming ritual. Waheeda is charming, and Nurzhaffira really nails this vibe of how having this girl is wonderful yet tiring. They're highly watchable, especially Nurzhaffira, once the inevitable reveals itself.

That's when the audience sees where the title is going, in a couple of ways, and while Nurzhaffira plays up how this is more than she can take and the devastation of it, writer/director Juliana Reza and the rest of the team emphasize what sort of inertia tradition and ritual have. It's evil tradition - even with what appear to be actual supernatural entities, there's no strong justification that this is effective or necessary - and Reza highlights the callousness of it as much as the grace of those consumed by it.


"Mom, Stay Dead"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

Filmmaker Lee Na-hee kicks off her short with a fun image - grieving daughter Sora (Oh Sohyeon) working her way through a book with "101 Ways to Summon the Dead", with #44 being the Ghost Summoning Dance - before coming up with a neat twist: The ghost she summons (Cho Ahra) seems to be roughly her age, having moved on from Earthly concerns, including the daughter she left behind, into her idealized form. There's maybe a fun sitcom premise in here, something about how family members would really relate if you removed the societal obligations and expectations from them.

It's maybe not far from the likes of Back to the Future or Chinese hit Hi, Mom - though I can't think of any that pull someone into the future rather than having their kids in the past - but aside from what Lee discussed in her Q&A about discovering what her mother could become once she was no longer worried about taking care of her daughter on a day-to-day basis, there's something intriguingly weighty here about spirituality. Sora has been using religion and magic as a way to fulfil her desires rather than really contemplating what all this implies, even as the mother recognizes innately that this girl needs something from her.

A very nifty twist on the idea of moving on that feels all the more honest because of how absurd and thought-provoking it can be simultaneously.


"Dhet!"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

There's a really strong theme across short films and anthologies this year of how gig work like rideshares and delivery is a sort of hell designed to be inescapable until it finally crushes a person, and I kind of worry that it will wind up staying in shorts and their equivalents in other media, because if you've got the money to make a feature, the business model behind this is kind of an abstract thing and you mostly see the convenience. It's a longer distance between classes than it used to be.

"Khet!", from Bangladesh, is a pretty decent example. The story itself is pretty basic - motorcycle-taxi guy (Ahsabul Yamin Riad) ignores a homeless man (Fozie Rabby) telling him not to take a certain turn and winds up unable to leave one of Dhaka's highways - and is perhaps ultimately more about the maddening geography of the city than the rider's circumstances. It's not a bad idea, since cities built around such highways are a topic of conversation in themselves, but it leaves writer/director Ummid Ashraf without a metaphorical offramp on top of the literal lack of one; the story kind of runs in circles without much chance of an ending that truly satisfies.


"Red Spider Lilies: The Ascension"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

"Red Spider Lilies" isn't quite made just for me, but it does take a genre I tend to really like - the haunted family calling the sort of professional exorcist who carries themselves more like an exterminator than a religious fanatic - and eventually twists it into one I like even more (which would be telling). Here, that's the Aoi sisters, living in an old family house, where one night something possesses Kotoko (Tomomi Kono), leaving Nana (Tomona Hirota) to call the famed Teshigawara (Hirotaro Honda), whom younger sister Ami (Eriko Nakamura) has seen a lot on television. Once there, though, Teshigawara finds this to be much more serious than his usual situation.

It's not a new observation that exorcism stories arguably work better in East Asian environs than elsewhere is that there is a sort of formal place for ghosts and demons in local mythologies with the opposing forces less formalized (in the West, there's the rigid hierarchy of the Catholic Church and the likes of snake-handlers but not a lot in between). So there's room for Teshigawara to be a professional and a celebrity and a lot of entertainment as the Aois interact with him like that, but also to be able to go in another direction when a twist comes without a whole lot of effort. Honda sells it well and injects dry humor into the film that doesn't undercut what else is going on, but the three sisters are great fun as well: Eriko Nakamura gets attention as the very funny Ami, but Tomona Hirota and Tomomi Kono solidify their older siblings as the short goes on.

Like "Magai-Gami", this is pretty explicitly a pilot/proof of concept, and I would quite like to see more.


I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festiva, laser DCP)

Watching this film, I chuckled at a low-budget horror-film producer being named "Rusty Festerson", and the actor playing him. Are they going to get that this Larry Fessenden cameo is a joke in Japan, or is this a film made for an extremely specific audience? If it is, that niche definitely includes me, and I'm glad to see it.

It opens by introducing two folks from different worlds. Shina (Ui Mihara) grew up in Japan with things coming relatively easy: Naturally pretty and doing okay in school and sports despite not really having to work very hard at them, show business was the first time she really had to apply herself, and really take pride in succeeding. Jack grew up in Eugene, Oregon, without anything ever coming easy, diving into horror movies and heavy metal, and eventually moving to New York City to work for Festerson's company and getting frustrated when it's just a job. Shina is frustrated too, showing disdain for her work, and taking a trip to New York with boyfriend Ren (Katsunari Nakagawa) to escape the limelight. Once there, though, English-speaking Ren finds himself frustrated by her nonsense and she feels disrespected, and an argument winds up with Shina, with no money or ID, outside a bar where Jack and his friends are commiserating over the star of their movie dropping out at the last minute. When Shina has nowhere to go at closing time, Jack lets her sleep on his couch, and manages to communicate that he'll pay for a flight back home if she acts in his movie, not knowing she's a big star rather than just a pretty face.

All in all, it's a fun little movie, charming as all get-out with the filmmakers keenly aware that a romantic comedy must be that, with everything else a secondary concern. And it works; even if I don't entirely buy that this pair falls in love with each other, I do believe that they fall in love with making movies with each other, and that's nearly as good for the movie's purposes. If that's something writer/director Kenichi Ugana planned for, that's smart, giving him a fallback position in case the romance doesn't quite get over, as the "making movies with friends" energy is solid enough to believe in Shina's half of the story.

That's sort of the film's biggest issue - Shina is a lot funnier and sympathetic, with a stronger arc than Jack, and I don't think it's necessarily a matter of assuming a foreign-language preform meets a certain standard even when you'll notice the flaws in one's native tongue. Ui Mihara is given a lot of assignments and mostly pulls them off, from the celebrity who is shallow enough that one can laugh at her arrogance to the professional kind of appalled by the mess she's found herself in to smitten to hurt; all kind of tying back to her opening mission statement. Estevan Muñoz isn't quite just given one note as Jack, but he's always playing it at full volume, and I don't know that it's a matter of Ugana being more comfortable in his native language and culture. The English-speaking supporting characters are by and large fun, but Jack is not a complementary half of the movie.

Fortunately, the rest of the movie is a good time, full of deadpan humor, missed translation jokes, and the ability to walk the line between getting laughs from what a sketchy production this is for what will almost certainly be a terrible movie and earnest respect for them making it. Ugana seem genuinely fond enough of its scrappers and has the knack for getting the audience to smile at them, which not all movies rooting for underdogs manage. He and the cast make the tricky transition from Jack and company clearly exploiting Shina in an uncomfortable way to her being part of the gang, and if you can feel an ending being jammed into place, it is at least jammed solidly into place.

I do kind of wonder how well this plays at places other than Fantasia, which is in large part about this sort of love affair between Eastern and Western pop culture, as well as mixing the global mainstream and the lowbrow. Still, even it's obviously going to play like gangbusters in that specific room, I suspect it's going to really amuse the folks who would enjoy being in that room if they could.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 1 August 2025 - 7 August 2024

Coming home Monday! Whatcha got, Boston?

• The Naked Gun gets a "legacysquel", with Leslie Nielsen the heretofore unmentioned son of Leslie Nielsen's Frank Drebin bumbling through an adventure where Police Squad! Is being threatened with defunding. It's at The Capitol Theatre, Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Causeway Street, Kendall Square, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, Arsenal Yards, and Chestnut Hill.
  
  Another sequel coming out this week is The Bad Guys 2, with the team of animal crooks blackmailed into one last heist as they try to go straight following the first movie. It's at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, West Newton, CinemaSalem, Boston Common (including RealD 3D & Spanish dub), Causeway Street (including RealD 3D), the Seaport, South Bay (including RealD 3D), Assembly Row (including Dolby CInema & RealD 3D), Arsenal Yards, and Chestnut Hill.
  
  Documentary Archcitection, in which director Victor Kossakovsky examines the use of concrete in buildings around the world, opens at the Somerville, Boston Common, Kendall Square, and the Seaport.
  
  Boston Common opens She Rides Shotgun, with Taron Egerton as a father who must train his daughter to avoid assassins.
  
  After opening Wednesday at West Newton, Boston Common, Causeway Street, Kendall Square, the Seaport, South Bay, and Assembly Row, Together also adds the Somerville and CinemaSalem on Friday.
  
  Sketch, in which a kid's drawings come to life and wreak havoc upon her town, opens Monday (Wednesday officially, but with two days of previews) at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Causeway Street, South Bay, and Assembly Row.
  
  Kids matinees include Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory at Kendall Square Saturday/Sunday/Wednesday, Shrek at Fresh Pond Monday to Thursday, and Migration at South Bay Monday/Wednesday.
  
  Sunset Boulevard has 75th anniversary shows at Boston Common on Sunday and Monday. Concert film Dead & Company: Live In Imax from Golden Gate Park plays Assembly Row Sunday. There are Monday mystery previews at Boston Common, Causeway Street, Kendall Square, South Bay, and Assembly Row. Freakier Friday gets a non-mystery "Fan First Screening" on Wednesday at Assembly Row, while Boston Common shows it as a double feature with the first film that evening.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre opens Folktales, a Norwegian documentary about a school above the Arctic circle and the teenagers who go there to learn traditional skills and connect to their heritage before adulthood.
  
  The Coolidge also opens a new set of Akira Kurosawa Restorations, with Throne of Blood (Friday/Saturday), The Hidden Fortress (Friday/Sunday),Rashomon (Saturday/Sunday), Yojimbo & Sanjuro (separate admissions Monday), Stray Dog (Tuesday/Thursday), Red Beard (Tuesday/Thursday), High and Low (Wednesday), and Ikiru (Wednesday).
  
  The midnight films in August are horror movies involving kids, with The Bad Seed on 35mm film Friday and Battle Royale on Saturday. CatVideoFest 2025 plays Sunday afternoon; Big is the 35mm Big Screen Classic on Monday; Ghost (on 35mm film) starts a Tuesday "Swayze Days" series; and there's a 35mm Cinema Jukebox show of Detroit Rock City on Thursday.
• Apple Fresh Pond had Telugu-language action drama Kingdom open Wednesday (also at Boston Common Causeway Street), and this week picks up Hindi animated adventure Mahavatar Narisimha, Hindi-language romance Dhadak 2, Hindi-language action-comedy Son of Sardaar 2, which, near as I can tell, is not based on a Telugu version remaking a Buster Keaton silent like its predecessor (also at Boston Common), and Kannada-language horror comedy Su From So. Hindi-language romance Saiyaara is held over (also at Boston Common).
  
  Chinese comedy The Lychee Road continues at Causeway Street.
• This week's Friday Film Matinee at The Brattle Theatre is Hercules in the Haunted World. They also pick up the new one from Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Cloud, with Masaki Suda as a crook who fears he is marked for revenge, playing a full schedule Friday to Sunday and matinees Monday/Wednesday/Thursday.
  
  They also play Singin' in the Rain to celebrate Donald O'Connor's 100th; continue Almania! With Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean on Monday and a double feature of 3 Women & Popeye on Tuesday; run Elmer Gantry in 35mm as part of the Summer of Satire on Wednesday; and continue "Women i the Waves" with a double feature of Kira Muratova's Brief Encounters & Márta Mészáros's The Girl on Thursday.
• The Harvard Film Archive has a quiet weekend of 35mm Mikio Naruse showing Three Sisters with Maiden Hearts (Friday evening); Tsuruhachi and Tsurujiro (Friday night); Sincerity (Saturday night); and Summer Cloads (Monday evening)
• The Museum of Fine Arts begins the annual French Film Festival with Night Call (Friday), Trois Amies (Saturday morning), When Fall is Coming (Saturday afternoon), Holy Cow (Sunday morning), and The Count of Monte Cristo (sold out Sunday afternoon).
• The Seaport Alamo shows CatVideoFest 2025 on Saturday/Sunday/Tuesday, begins a Saturday swordplay series with The Tale of Zatoichi, starts cycling through the Harry Potter movies again with Sorcerer's Stone on Saturday/Sunday/Tuesday, plays Tales from the Hood on Monday, and has a Movie Party presentation of Clueless on Wednesday.
• The Somerville Theatre has Vanishing Point for Saturday's Midnight special. Monday/s Great Remakes double feature is Invasion of the Body Snatchers '56 & '78. The GreenScreen show on Tuesday is a 35mm print of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Wednesday's Summer Camp show is Grey Gardens.
• The Regent Theatre also has CatVideoFest 2025, twice a day on Saturday & Sunday.
• Landmark Kendall Square's Tuesday comedy classic is Wet Hot American Summer.
• Outdoor screenings listed at Joe's Free Films: Song of the Sea at the MIT Open Space and Despicable Me 4 at the Charles River Esplanade on Friday; School of Rock at the Prudential Center on Saturday; The Devil Wears Prada at TimeOut Market on Monday; and "interactive" night with The Super Mario Bros. Movie at the Somerville Library plus Turning Red at Greene-Rose Heritage Park in Cambridge, Despicable Me 4 at Castle Island, and Commitment Phobia at Goethe-Institut (RSVP required) on Wednesday; and Barbie at Somerville's Statue Park in Davis Square (which I guess is what we're calling Seven Hills Park now) on Thursday.
• The Embassy in Waltham is open all week with Fantastic Four.
  
  The Lexington Venue is open all week but Monday with Shoshana, Bad Shabbos, and The Last Class. The Danny Boyle/Benedict Cumberbatch/Jonny Lee Miller Frankenstein with Miller as Victor and Cumberbatch as the Creature plays Saturday morning, and the version with the roles reversed plays Thursday evening.
  
  The West Newton Cinema opens Sabbath Queen (including a special event with director Sandi Simcha DuBowski and Tufts Professor Heather Nathans on Sunday afternoon) and The Bad Guys 2, keeping Sorry, Baby, Fantastic Four, Together, The Last Class, and Bad Shabbos.
  
  Cinema Salem has The Bad Guys 2, Fantastic Four, Together, and Superman through Monday. Friday's Night Light show is The Heroic Trio. Light week for rep, with 42nd Street for the Wednesday Classic and Weirdo Wednesdays down the hall.

I'll be in Montreal through Monday, though I'm kind of kicking myself at not choosing an earlier flight so I can catch Cloud at the Brattle. Anyway, Fantasia through Sunday, then probably catching the last shows of The Lychee Road and Imax 3D Fantastic Four when I get home.

Fantasia 2025.07: Stinker, "First Rites", Sweetness, Peau à Peau, "A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers", and Contact Lens

If you'd told me ahead of time which program on today's schedule would be one of my favorites of the festival I might not have believed you.

We kicked things off with Stinker and director Yerden Telemissov (center), who really came off as a charming, sweet guy making his first feature as a director after working as an actor for years. He's a big dude, so it's probably not entirely surprising that he's mostly been cast as gangsters and other heavies, but from the film he made and the way he talks, that's got to be some really impressive acting.

Next up, we have programmer Carolyn Mauricette with "First Rites" director Findlay Ironside, whose short I liked a bit more than the feature it was attached to.

After a dinner break, I headed across the street for Peau à Peau, which being a French-Canadian film had a whole mess of people in attendance, and me crossing my finger that the "subtitled in English" label on the program wasn't just a little joke at my expense, the way that it sometimes can be. Thankfully, it was not!

Still, kind of no idea what director Chloé Cinq-Mars and star Rose-Marie Perreault are talking about here.

And, finally, we head a bit closer to the mountain with Justine Smith introducing Birdy Hung Wei Ting, whose short "A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers" played before Contact Lens and was a real delight, as was the feature. This surprised me a bit, because they are riffs on specific art-house films that I might have missed - I only saw Jeanne Dielman because it won the Sight & Sound poll and IFFBoston and the Somerville Theatre booked it on 35mm - but there's a bit of a lesson here in that even films that get the reputation as being challenging or for sophisticates can be for everyone. These Hung and Contact Lens director Lu Ruiqi sort of pull the best bits out of the films they homage and twist them in a way that the fun is front-and-center, but the material itself is still great, and works beyond just recognition or a secret handshake between cineastes.

That said… Contact Lens can drag a bit like Jeanne Dielman in points, so I did at one point reach into my backpack for an energy drink I'd purchased for the next morning. It was disturbingly effective and now I'm making sure I'm carrying some little Pepsi Zeros for when I start to flag during marathon movie sessions like this.


So there's Tuesday! Wednesday would be A Grand Mockery, Every Heavy Thing, The House With Laughing Windows, the "Things That Go Bump in the East" shorts, and I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn. Today (the next Tuesday), I'll probably do The Undertone, the "Diasporing Dualities" shorts, LifeHack, and Dollhouse. Stuntman is good fun.


Sasyq (Stinker)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Stinker absolutely plays like a "kid hiding his new alien friend" movie, except that the kid is a homeless former classics professor in his sixties and the best jokes involve attempted suicide and a hand grenade. It's well enough made, but for who? Is last year's Steppenwolf all the more shocking because this is sort of the norm for mainstream entertainment in Kazakhstan?

It opens with that initially-nameless professor (Bakhytzhan Alpeis) attempting to end his life in various manners but not able to go through with it for one reason or another. When he's not doing that, he's hanging out in the general area of a roadside convenience store operated by crusty grandmother Nadya (Irka Abdulmanova) as she watches out for her granddaughter (Ailin Sultangazina). He's the only one that sees a UFO crash-land, disintegrating and leaving only one survivor (Chingiz Kapin). The Earth's sun would burn him severely, and it turns out that the only place nearby that approximates his home planet is the hole beneath the shop's outhouse. As the professor and the alien try to repair a communication device, the town's mayor is getting worked up over a motorcade that will pass the town in a few days, instructing a policeman to get word out to the residents to put their best foot forward, and clear away undesirables, like a homeless drunk going on about aliens.

As these movies go, it's mostly fairly pleasant and straightforward. The characters are familiar enough types played relatively well, especially once things thaw a bit and the granny and professor start warming to each other. The comedy tends toward the scatalogical - the title comes from two characters who kind of reek - but director Yerden Telemissov and coo-writer Sergey Litovchenko mostly keep their film on the side of the line where it's amusingly rude rather than truly disgusting. There doesn't seem to be much budget for special effects, but what there is looks reasonably nifty, well designed and within the limits of what they can do.

It still winds up feeling like they're executing a familiar template, and the pieces that could add some color don't do that much. The mayor, who seems to have a nice office from which to run a town that otherwise feels like a wide part of the highway, is introduced as a petty despot but never seems to have any villainous ambition or worthwhile secrets to hide. There's stuff that will maybe help the alien get home, but it doesn't amount to much other than making one wonder if police badges are literal tin in this town. There's a joke to be made about how folks in an advanced civilization don't know a whole lot about their tools in folks vaguely seeking some sort of metal, but this isn't that movie.

It means that the end is a real mess, with the mayor suddenly able to call on militarized police even though he's been leaning on one overmatched deputy (and as much as I'm kind of okay with a cop willing to prostrate himself for this mayor being the butt of some kind of mean physical comedy, the bits where he's deprived of his inhaler cross the line into cruelty), so that there can be a more bombastic climax. That's where the hand grenade comes in, and even that joke gets elongated just long enough to not be quite so much fun.

The film ambles along well enough, but it's hard to imagine anyone but kids being terribly amused, and I'm pretty sure I'd get into trouble with by brothers if I showed it to my nieces and nephews, so I'm really not sure who the audience is.


"First Rites"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)

Do genre festival programmers have a sort of insider term for "short that is build-up to and execution of some sort of supernatural rite, followed by an unexpected result?" I'm not complaining about them, mind you; just noticing that they seem to show up fairly often. "First Rites" is actually a pretty good example - it starts with an awkward conversation between Martha (Vanessa Gonzalez-Egan), who claims to a private chef, and Kirk (Matt Vince), who delivers her animal blood from the meat market, his interest being unwanted and maybe inappropriate; continues as Martha tries to revive the corpse of Jane Hudson; and then hits the viewer with a punchline.

It's done well-enough, although at times I wonder about the odd part of the house where the ritual is performed (I imagine the owner of the house saying uh-uh, you shoot the whole thing in the entryway even if it looks weird and keep your fake blood away from the carpet and the dining room); writer/director Findlay Ironside and her team bring a sort of foreboding atmosphere to a suburban environment that seems like it would be extremely unremarkable just outside Martha's door, and her specific discomfort with Kirk's persistence lets one think that her motivations are one thing as opposed to something else, even though there's been a clue or two dropped. The punchline is pretty darn good.

So, yes, this is a familiar sort of short, but executed rather well.


Sweetness

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)

Let's start with the usual caveats that I have never been a teenage girl and that the nieces that I only see once every few months at family things seem pretty well-adjusted. They're maybe unnecessary, because I do more or less buy into the parts of Sweetness that are about Rylee being obsessed and going horrifically overboard in a way she figures is well-meaning, even if it's not particularly exciting to me. It's the rest that kind of falls flat and makes the film a grind to get through.

Said girl is Rylee Hill (Kate Hallett), whose widowed father (Justin Chatwin) is dating a woman she doesn't particularly like (Amanda Brugel) and who gets relentlessly teased at school, although she probably isn't helping herself by doing things like having her earbuds in when best friend Sidney (Aya Furukawa) wants to include a boy or two in their hangouts. Her current favorite musician is Floorplan frontman Payton Adler (Herman Tømmeraas), and both Rylee and Sid are excited for the weekend's concert. They get separated as Sidney wants to hang out with other friends, and Rylee is nearly run over by Payton before being offered a ride home. It's not quite a dream come true - her dreams involve much more! - and that's before the supposedly-sober Payton stops at a dealer's house and crashes the car. Rylee decides she's going to help him detox, and why not - her father's job means she's got access to handcuffs, said father and Marnie are away on a weekend retreat, and she's also house-sitting a place just down the street whose retired owners won't be back from their cruise for weeks.

Roughly halfway through Sweetness, I found myself thinking that this has escalated too far, too fast, and I didn't see how the filmmakers could work with their new baseline and stakes. Sadly, they can';- it's suddenly much harder to empathize with Rylee and the filmmakers don't seem to have a new plan to get the audience to understand her (and I wouldn't be shocked if they had trouble showing this petite girl lugging people around in a way that made it believable. There's really only one scene to come that delivers on the potential of the start.

It goes to show that sometimes even a relatively small independent film can be too big. The bit about Sweetness that intrigued is two characters in a room - the idol-worshipping teen girl who needs music to hold her together and the pop star whose own issues are causing him to crack - and once everyone is spending time on Things Getting Worse and Not Getting Caught, that all winds up in the background. The movie becomes a thriller of mechanics, but the folks involved don't seem to realize this, deferring what Rylee is doing to stay ahead of things which haven't been presented as a threat yet and acting like the character's well hasn't been poisoned.

Kate Hallett puts in the effort - even at the moments when Rylee seems to have an unchanging resting scowl, the audience can feel the mix of sadness and rage within her, and even when she's confident, it's a wavering, convincing-herself confidence. Hallett can be convincing in her heartbreak and teenage earnestness, enough to pull the audience in despite everything else. It's a nice complement to Herman Tømmeraas, who convincingly presents Payton's inner turmoil in moments when he's not just a jackass or rightly terrified and lashing out at the teenage psycho or yelling for help.

The mess of the second half causes the movie to end with a quiet thud that's all the worse because the epilogue suggests an intriguing alternate explanation for what's going through one secondary character's head. Interesting and unnerving as those last scenes are, this isn't that movie, or the one that it started as.


Peau à Peau (aka Nesting)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Les Fantastiques Week-Ends du Cinéma Québéçois, laser DCP)

Peau à Peau feels like a random, zig-zagging movie that raises things and then has the filmmakers get distracted, not returning until much later, and it maybe takes a while for a viewer to recognize that it's not distraction, but a different sort of seeming randomness. While the audience is looking for some sort of casual chain, this is about traumas being stacked, and the seeming lack of a pattern is part of the problem.

Motherhood is not coming easy to Pénélope (Rose-Marie Perreault) - not only did she have a difficult pregnancy, but her baby Lou's premature birth nearly killed her, and now that he's born, he's not gaining weight even as he seems to do nothing but feed, and won't sleep through the night, with boyfriend Gaspard (Simon Landry-Desy) somehow not awakened by the crying. She's taking Lou for a walk to the local depanneur during one of these incidents when it is held up, and she recognizes the robber as her sister Charlotte (Marie Bélanger). Coincidentally, a former lover she and Charlotte met at camp as teenagers, Swiss artist Edward (Saladin Dellers) has returned to Montreal for a gallery exhibition, and rekindling that relationship highlights how frustrated she is with Gaspard.

Also, during the robbery, "Charlotte" dropped her gun and Pénélope picked it up and has been keeping it close.

Viewers are often used to seeing thrillers as clockwork constructions, mysteries which can be solved and traced from start to finish then more or less safely put away, because that is in many way how minds work for everything. This isn't how things work for Pénélope; each new crisis reminds her of the last time she was this scared and vulnerable, but others have difficulty seeing beyond the issue at hand. So while they are trying to do what they can to handle that (or just as often seeing Pénélope as a disruptive source of problems), Pénélope is creating connections in her own mind trying to find a pattern, and it's leading her to stranger and more desperate places.

On the way, I often wasn't sure what to make of Rose-Marie Perreault as Pénélope as she wavered between grounded and the sort of exhausted that occasionally results in blurting out something shocking or unfiltered, with occasional detours into what can read as overacting until one realizes the extent to which she is in the process of cracking. There's a sort of consistency to her chaotic reactions, though, and Perreault manages to keep it unnerving or desperate enough that an outburst out of almost nowhere never seems out of character, but just this moment's last stray. She and filmmaker Chloé Cinq-Mars occasionally slip a glimpse of the woman she was before her pregnancy in, sometimes briefly enough that you don't know you've seen it.

I had, admittedly, expected a more genre-adjacent film (maybe not The Babadook, but in that neighborhood), but the filmmakers use that sort of thing sparingly: Mirrors don't seem to quite work right, at least for Pénélope, and the filmmakers often edit in a way meant to unsettle, jumping forward when the audience expects to stay in the same time and place, although the occasional narrated dates in the baby diary are a reminder that not much time has passed, and Pénélope is deteriorating fast.

I suspect this one will grow on me. So much about it is built to not just misdirect, but to trigger the instincts that say a film isn't working, even if it actually is, and a second viewing with that in mind could be interesting.


"A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2025 in Cinéma du Musée Even (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)
Where to stream A Brighter Summer Day (Prime link), or order the disc at Amazon

I think I need to see A Brighter Summer Day the next time it shows up in the Boston area, which probably won't be too long, because the various venues back home all tend to circle back around to Edward Yang eventually. I loved this short, but feel like a lot of what's in it has sort of been hanging around my consciousness for a while in clips and stills, and wonder how much Birdy Hung Wei-Ting and company are impressing me with impressive mimicry of something acknowledged to be great and how much is their distinctive spin.

It doesn't quite feel like that, though, especially when this film's Ming, after buying a bag of watermelon juice that seems like it could be on a collision course for her white school uniform, cheerfully buys a ticket to The Lady Avenger, a violent bit of pulp that she gobbles up, seeming to intimidate the boy smitten with her. You can see Hung flip the script even if you don't know what that script is, as Ming's fantasies take on a much more assertive bent and the boy starts to freak out. It's funny and unnerving on top of being genuinely beautiful.


He ma pi fu (Contact Lens)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2025 in Cinéma du Musée Even (Fantasia Festival: Animation Plus, laser DCP)
Where to stream Jeanne Dielman (Prime link), or order the disc at Amazon

A delightfully playful riff on a classic (Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles) that likely nobody would describe that weird to describe, Contract Lens can still sometimes have its inspiration's methodical nature, but pairs it with whimsy much more often as it is very much its own thing.

Bubble (Zhong Yunxi) lives on her own in a nice little apartment, tending to run late as she starts her day, screaming "I know!" when appliances inform her their work is done while she's still dressing or putting in her contacts. When not tutoring a little girl (Wu Shiqi) on her Chinese characters, she spends much of her time in the park, shooting various objects and people with her camcorder, and befriends one confident girl (Chen Fan) who seems tickled by the idea of being a muse. Bubble's "roommate" surprises her, though; she has "adopted a film", with the kitchen from Jeanne Dielman projected on a screen in Bubble's, and Jeanne (Dai Yanli) appears to be aware of the situation.

The most obvious fun comes from how writer/director Lu Ruiqi plays with the projection, having Jeanne initially bumping into the movie screen from the other side, or having Bubble occasionally seem to pass into and out of Jeanne's world, or having it interact with the balcony behind it. Lu tends to stage these moments more like magic tricks than visual effects, carefully matching Zhong Yunxi walking behind a sheet with her entering on the other set previously, or arranging things so that Dai Yanli's eyeline matches with the outside world. Lu will often start a scene blurry, bringing it into focus as Bubble puts her lenses in.

That's maybe not just a gag, but a reminder that Bubble is introverted and tends to interact with the world through a lens. She tells her outgoing new friend that many of the people she shoots are also shy and seem to prefer the camera as a mediator. She spends a lot of time on her laptop editing, and as the film goes on, she interacts more with Jeanne, though at a remove, than the friend who is right there. A fan who would "adopt" a film this way is often inherently possessive, and one wonders if Jeanne's apparent growing independence (real or imagined) springs from Bubble's fandom and obsession, and where it could lead Bubble.

The film, it must be said, is not non-stop surrealism and meta-commentary; though there are bits that are quite funny even outside of that (and I would love someone who speaks and reads Chinese to tell me just exactly how funny one of the penmanship lessons is), the film also parallels Jeanne Dielman in ways that can frustrate the folks who would avoid a three-and-a-half-hour arthouse drama, even at well under 90 minutes: We spend a lot of time watching Bubble do chores, or staring at ordinary, inactive things through the eyepiece of her camera, and repeating them. It's a contrast in some ways - Bubble has labor-saving devices that nevertheless seem to stress her out compared to the patient, methodical Jeanne - but it can occasionally give some viewers the fidgets in the way that the original film does.

I do kind of wonder how Contact Lens would have hit me without Jeanne Dielman being listed at the top of the Sight & Sound list and thus creating more of an impetus to see it when it had more bookings than usual a couple years ago. There's enough to it that doesn't necessarily require familiarity with that specific film, but it's a richer experience knowing it.

Fantasia 2025.06: Cielo, Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers, Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards, "The Traveler & The Troll", and Dog of God

Man, I remember when weekdays at this festival were shorter than weekend days and you could get out touristing before the first movie!

First stop in de Sève for the day was Cielo with producer John Dunton-Dowser and director Alberto Sciamma, who mentioned seeing the first couple images in a dream but had no idea where they would fit in any sort of story. He mentioned this to Dunton-Dowser, whose wife is from Bolivia, and learning about it started to give the story shape. Because a movie takes time to come together, the three young actresses they were considering for the lead aged out, which led them to Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda, whom they describe as a truly remarkable young lady. She sent a video greeting that played before the movie in what sounded to my ears like pretty darn good French; she's been in a French-immersion school for the past year and Sciamma boasts that she's caught up with most of the kids who have been learning since kindergarten. Part of their goal for the movie is to help fund her education, the filmmakers describe it as a place where the drop-off between the private and public schools is very steep.

Sciamma really seems to have fallen in love with the place, praising the local crew and how they made it a Bolivian film rather than one by a Spanish filmmaker. He also took care to mention that the altitude in Bolivia can really throw you for a loop: La Paz is the most altitudinous capital city in the world, 2km above sea level, so the air is thin and the deserts get far chillier than you would think just from looking at them. A beautiful country, by all accounts, but not for the weak of spirit.

Next up, Ruppert Bottenberg hosting Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers director Amélie Ravalec, who discovered this strain of post-WWII Japanese art relatively recently and did a deep dive into it. Having made this sort of broad-overview documentary before, one thing she noted was that while Western artists in previous projects would often agree to participate quickly but maybe not be incredibly helpful, the Japanese artists often took quite a bit of convincing but were very giving of their time once they assented. There was more she would have liked, but given the timeframe, several people she wanted to interview had passed, and including even seconds of archival footage from television interviews (for example) would have ballooned the feature's budget.

The film would be back in town with French subtitles at the end of the week (now, if you're in Montreal), and has also been reworked into an artbook that was promoted in the closing credits, and it should be a good companion, considering just how much material is in the movie.

There might have technically been time to fit the Korean shorts package in at de Sève before crossing the street, but with everything running a few minutes late, but not the consistent same few minutes, I decided not to chance it, got some food, and then saw Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards in Hall (can't quite make the shift to Alumni Auditorium). Good fun.

I'm not going to lie, I was worn down by the time we got to Dog of God, but you've got to respect the bling the Abele brothers wore to their screening. I think I dozed through a lot of their movie, which seems hard to believe, but is true. On the other hand…

Here's Adam Murray, with Ruppert to the left and Daniel in the background, and his short "The Traveler & The Troll" was worth the price of admission (or time on the schedule). I'm not sure I've seen anything that recalls Weird Jim Henson so well since his passing!

And that's last Monday in the books. Tuesday would be Stinker, Sweetness, Peau à Peau, and Contact Lens. Today (the next Monday), I'll be at Transcending Dimensions, The Woman, Looking for an Angel, Hi-Five, and Kazakh Scary Tales, if all goes well.


Cielo

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

The filmmakers admitted to being concerned with aesthetic over story in the introduction, and there were times I felt it, down to having to more or less invent a theme that doesn't quite work to make elements palatable (see below). Still, Cielo ultimately worked in ways that this sort of contemporary South American fantasy film often doesn't work for me, finding a way for its flights of fantasy to bring me in rather than take me out.

It opens serenely, with seven-year-old Santa (Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda) sitting by a beautiful lake, before she catches and swallows a large goldfish. She walks back to the stone house her father is building, but what happens next is shocking, and soon she is on the road, pulling a cart with a large barrel on it, bound for the sea. She makes a trade for a truck with a priest (Luis Bredow), who probably didn't think she was going to drive away in it. That she only gets so far is more on the truck than her, but she'll soon be met by others, including a luchadora going by "La Reina" (Mariela Salaverry) and policeman Gustavo (Fernando Arze Echalar), thoroughly puzzled by the trail Santa has left behind.

The film is, if nothing else, gorgeous from start to finish. Director Alberto Sciamma and cinematographer Alex Metcalfe are certainly aided by finding great things to point a camera at, drawing upon the landscape without seeming to push into the fantastical. The film has one of the most beautiful opening shots you'll see, and whether Santa winds up in small towns, the desert, or the city, there are surprising compositions and delightful combinations of colors. These are also environments where people seem at home, with faces and costumes that seldom seem exaggerated.

Young lead Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda is also fantastic on her own, 8 years old and with the ability to play a magical, precocious child who seldom sounds like a teenager or like she's saying the words of an adult screenwriter trying to sound like a child. She's a confident kid who sells having a little girl's perspective on her unique experience, and it's why one believes she can accomplish miracles in this world; she never seems not part of it. There is authority covering warmth in the performances of the people she meets - men like Luis Bredow's priest and Fernando Arze Echalar's cop who maybe need someone as remarkable as Santa to unearth the decency between their world-weariness and women Mariela Salaverry's empathetic entertainer.

The story, though... Well, it very clearly follows the imagery of the idea for a scene, and I suspect that it's useful that the violent opening will mea some folks are just going to be out less than ten minutes in. Santa may be a wondrous enough girl that a found family coalesce around her, but to the extent it does, it is all on the performances. The story has the right shape and the cast sells it, but it's a framework, not something that one can dig into.

That's enough, for the most part. It's a great movie to look at with some great pieces, just all aesthetic and emotion as opposed to the sources of that emotion.

(The structure I found myself trying to impose on the film is that I think you've got to posit that this whole plan comes from a desperate mother who places too much weight on an 8-year-old, even one who can perform miracles, but it's not something the movie really examines. Maybe Gustavo recognizes that what Santa does is not truly her fault, but there are things a policeman has to do once the scene is discovered that are elided over.)


Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Documentaries from the Edge, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers is firmly in the category of documentaries that I treat like an introductory university course, right down to taking three times as many notes as I normally would for a feature of its length. Obviously it's not even that, but it's a solid chunk of good information to get someone started on the topic.

As these things go, it is pretty darn solid. The filmmakers break things down into logical sections that touch upon the context of these artists' work without ever straying to the point of the film really being about something else, and get what seem to be fairly open, unguarded interviews with the surviving subjects. Even in the earlier sections of the film, where its roughly-chronological nature has them discussing the horrors of World War II and its aftermath, they tend to focus on it shaping them as opposed to releasing a lot of raw emotion, but they are the survivors who found outlets long ago.

Mostly, though, director Amélie Ravalec includes a ton of art - plenty enough to be a good sampler, with the narration relevant but not like someone standing behind your shoulder in a museum, explaining everything in detail rather than letting you experience it and make your own connections. Clearly, she feels, the best way to start to understand a work is to look at it, and while contextualization is useful, one's appreciation of a work must ultimately come from the work itself. It's overwhelming at times, though, with seemingly a new work to examine every minute (the citations part of the credits is long); the companion book is probably going to be great.

There's also a very nice soundtrack, not exactly recognizable needle drops to me, but reinforcing the energy of the period and movement(s) and providing a rhythm that keeps the film from feeling like either a fire hose of information or like it's waiting for you to catch up. It's a really nice presentation.

(Fair warning: There is a lot of bondage, enough to make you wonder if this is what caught the filmmaker's eye originally, with a section attempting to explain why there's so much after so much has gone by without much comment. By the end, it's more like a bit of an odd emphasis.)


Akabane Honeko no Bodyguard (Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Purchase the manga at Amazon

My friend Tony, who owns the local comic shop, often talks about how his son is into manga and anime but tends not to overlap them for the same property: If he reads the manga, he'll probably skip the anime, and vice versa. I don't know how the live-action adaptations tend to figure in for him, but I do find myself feeling the same way about them lately: As much as I dig movies like Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards and see where they've been compressed, I'm not sure I need to go back to the source material. This is fun but you can burn a lot of time getting the same story twice.

Honeko Adabane (Natsuki Deguchi) is an ambitious high school student - she's got dreams of being both a dancer and a lawyer like her parents - and not the sort who has a hundred-million dollar bounty placed upon her head. That's because her birth father is Masahito Jingu (Ken'ichi Endo), head of the Japanese equivalent of the CIA; he grabs roughneck Ibuki Arakuni (Raul Murakami), a childhood friend of Honeko's, off the street and asks him to be her bodyguard, although part of the job is making sure she is not aware of the forces attacking her. Ibuki agrees, but stumbles on his first attempt. Fortunately, Honeko's best friend and dance teammate Nei Toyega (Hikaru Takahashi) is also working for Jingu - as is all of class 3-4, led by dorky-looking Sumiko Somejima (Daiken Okudaira), and trained in various specialties since pre-school. But with the price on Honeko's head so high, will Somejima's "23 tarot cards" be enough?

Honeko Akabane's bodyguards definitely falls into the trap where folks adapting a manga have trouble fitting the whole story into a two hour movie - there's a spot where original manga-ka Masamitsu Nigatsu probably milked two or three cliffhangers in weekly serialization out of what's an annoying 5-minute delay here - even when you don't have 25 title characters. You could streamline the heck out of this, except that doing so would probably not just lose one of the most entertaining subplots, but the sheer excess of it is part of what makes it so much fun as the filmmakers frantically pile more on well past the point where they actually need to, a hilarious surprise if you're going in fairly blind and probably still entertaining for the sheer audacity of it if not.

It's pretty goofy all around, with some very winning performances in the center, particularly the very fun chemistry between Raul Murakami and Natsuki Deguchi who actually feel like opposites attracting; Murakami is great at suddenly dropping Ibuki's tough-guy pretenses to present a very affable doofus with a massive crush on Honeko, while Deguchi is good at catching how Honeko is smart, assertive, and kind of dorky (when it comes to the law) underneath the sort of pleasantness that can often read as bland. Ken'ichi Endo makes Jingu a funny character whom one can nevertheless believe is a wily spy master, and Tao Tsuchiya is a real delight swinging Masachika from genuinely dangerous villain to socially maladjusted weirdo and using the same backstory for each.

The filmmakers also find a good balance between using the premise for groan-worthy gags and good character based comedy, and there's style to spare. I presume the look is comic-accurate, and both the white-and-black school uniforms (with the assassins in all black a helpful inverse) and the slick outfits Masachika's crew sports. It's fun and poppy while still giving its weirdos room to be likable teenagers even amid the spy movie hijinks.

There's some fairly entertaining action, too: The filmmakers do a nice job blending slapstick with some actual danger, dedicated to keeping it hand to hand and selling that these spy kids might hold off a few professional assassins.

Not sold: Folks thinking Tao Tsuchiya's character is a guy. But, then, that's also a manga trope dialed up to the max, and that's what makes this movie work.


"The Traveler & The Troll"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

I don't know that writer/director Adam Murray is directly influenced by the late Jim Henson here - he could be young enough to have been born after Henson's passing - but his short hits a particular Henson vibe that maybe isn't represented as much among his successors as kid-friendly Muppets: A world where the macabre creatures are possessed of dry wit, moving about in such a way that a viewer can see that they are puppets but where the uncanniness makes them a little creepier. The effect is ultimately still comic, but with the lingering feeling that it could have been scary.

Instead, it's kind of charming, with the troll (voiced by Dave Child) demanding an answer to three riddles when the traveler (Erika Ishii) who has passed through his territory has no money, only to find that she really likes riddles and he's seldom had to actually pose three. It's a goofy little thing, but that sort of flipping the script from unnerving to amusing is a big part of this sort of piece's appeal.


Dieva suns (Dog of God)

N/A (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Animation Plus, laser DCP)

Dog of God has a hell of an opener, as its blindfolded werewolf protagonist squares off against a giant and rips its testicles off. It's metal as hell and brothers Lauris & Raitis Abele know how everything works together here, with grandiose physical acting enhanced by rotoscoped animation and a no-messing-around soundtrack, going for "hell yeah!" right away.

It falls off, though, and I found myself unable to hang with it much after that, whether because I was worn out from it being the last film of the day or because the story was pretty darn dull. There are audiences for nasty medieval fantasy where everyone is some degree of cruel or cynical, but it doesn't create a rooting interest in me, and later bits of violence struggled to match the operatic intensity of the opener.

Still, I'm not sure how I slept through so much of a movie this loud.

Fantasia 2025.05: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, The Battle Wizard, and Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark

Unusually short day, but a long post because it started with a shorts package. Well, didn't exactly start with it; I spent the first slot back in the apartment, finishing a post covering Friday, because the two things on offer were Japanese Avant Garde Pioneers, which would run again the next day, and Bullet in the Head, which I've watched a couple times in the last couple years and believe has already been announced as the group of Hong Kong classics from the Golden Princess collection that Shout! Factory will be touring soon. You're welcome!

Between being the last one in and sitting where I can escape in a hurry if need be, it wasn't a great spot for pictures, especially if you use the phone's panorama setting:

Let's split that up a bit.

So off at the very far left, we have the event's host, then "Filther" filmmaker Simen Nyland, from Norway; "Lola" director Grace Hanna & executive producer Derek Manansala, from the US; "Weird to be Human" director Jan Grabowski, art director Agnieszka Adamska, and production designer Juliusz Dabrowski, from Poland; and "Disappeared" director Jeong Eun-uk, from South Korea.

Jeong's interpreter was next, then finally representing "Fingerprints of the Gods" were writer/director Wei Zhenfeng, producer Zhong Yu, and one more member of the crew, with their interpreter hiding behind.

I believe my favorite bit of the Q&A was Grabowski being asked about creating the look for their synthezoid character and handing the mike to Adamska after saying a few words, where she said she had about $2,000 for the whole thing and then they had to use most of it on a skullcap because the actress wouldn't shave her head and so that made things harder than they needed to be.

After that, it was a decision between a restored Shaw Brothers film at 5:40 and something maybe sci-fi-ish at 6:30, and I chose the former even though I knew I'd probably be getting it on disc soon enough; the description of the other seemed a bit inside-baseball. It gave me a bit of time for the annual burger at Mr. Steer before heading across the street for Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark, which was one of the things I've had circled on the schedule since it was announced, having dug the original when it played the Brattle in its American release, kind of amazed there was a follow-up.

Then back to the apartment, with Cielo, Japanese Avant Garde Pioneers, Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards, and Dog of God on tap for Monday. It's Saturday now, and I'm planning on Hold the Fort, The Girl Who Stole Time, Influencers, and Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo, with Funky Forest highly recommended.


"Moon & Back"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

Writer/director Pony Nicole Herauf knows that the science-fictional aspects of her short film don't make a lot of sense, and bakes it into the beginning, when Branch (Bren Eastcott) and Mattie (Mattie Driscoll) phone a radio call-in show and are yelled at on-air for saying that the issue in their relationship is that their close friendship struggled when Branch was away at college, and now her new job is going to take her to the moon. It's going to be a big thing soon, they say.

Is it? Well, there's not exactly a lot else in the story to suggest it, but also only the most occasional slip to suggest that Branch is sick and may either be dying soon or undergoing experimental treatment far away, and this is a last weekend where that euphemism will be strictly enforced. It's not a thing one sees in the very funny performances from Eastcott & Driscoll at first - Branch & Mattie are the sort of delightfully ordinary folks who are funny in large part because of how they come off as mainly being funny to each other, even with Herauf giving them a lot of good lines - but they're good enough to give a lot of heft to scenes played against somewhat lo-fi visual effects toward the end.


"Lola"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

I'm inclined to believe that "Lola" depicts what's actually going on, with teenage prodigy Tessie (Jovie Leigh) making yet another attempt to cure or at least arrest her grandmother's fast-moving dementia. It's got the feeling of someone who has always been superlatively bright running hard into her limitations and kind of doesn't work unless Tessie can actually get in there and receive one last bit of good advice from the part of Lola's brain that hasn't been scrambled.

Of course, what's fun is that the apparent limitations of a student film lead to director Grace Hanna making a lot of choices that emphasize that this is from the point of view of a precocious child, from the animation to the props made of everyday objects to a mindscape that's got the same general form of one where filmmakers spend millions of dollars to create a mental library but is all the more poignant for its relative simplicity. The costume Leigh is given to wear as Tessie is also adorable whether it's the characters existing in a heightened world, her sort of playing dress-up, or somewhere in between.


"First Sight"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

"First Sight" looks like it's going to be a "don't fall in love with an AI construct" thing, but writer/director Andew McGee has some more interesting things to do, as widow Luna (Ellise Chappell) is matched for a first-date with handsome, likable Antony (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd). As a writer who reviews new consumer technology, she's got top-of-the-line Bluetooth contact lenses with a powerful AI in her phone offering useful advice on the heads-up display, but taking its recommendations doesn't make for an exciting date, and that's before the ransomware attacks.

I've been wondering when we were going to start to get more stories of artificial intelligence being kind of useless in situations where human expression is concerned, as features continue to come out with androids who are more human that human or AIs that can outwit even the most clever protagonist, and that's pretty far from the experience of anyone who has desperately tried to shut Copilot off. McGee is smart about this without it coming off as a lecture, and the ransomware bit is clever (although I'm almost more frightened of a hack where my reading glasses replace the fine print on a contract), although it kind of stretches the blind date out in a way that seems untenable.

Ellise Chappell is pretty darn good through that, at least, and all-around; she captures the bits of McGee's script that require her to be sad in a big way, even if it's not always on her face, and the sort of generally nervous that makes these sort of shortcuts so tempting. Jacob Fortune-Lloyd hits the right tone as well, disappointed enough that Luna is taking outside cues enough for it to show without seeming mean or sanctimonious enough to be unappealing.


"Disappeared"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

"Disappeared" kind of feels a little more like The Matrix with the serial numbers scraped off than one would maybe like, although with interesting ways to go should Eunuk Jeong get a chance to expand it. There are times when I wondered a bit if it were written and selected with the intent of showing off the studio in which it was shot in a sort of symbiotic way, a chance for both the business and the filmmaker to have a polished calling card, and that determined a lot of its emphasis.

I do kind of like the central performance by Tan Woo-seok, whose character seems to be the sort of screw-up where both he and those who know him get frustrated at how his limitations get in the way of his being generally likable - one sort of feels bad for noting how annoying it must be - and he's got a bit more range than that when need be.


"No Nation"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

Between this and 40 Acres, I'm liking the greater Native/First Nations representation showing up in some recent post-apocalyptic tales. Not necessarily a whole lot, but enough to make one consider how some things would shake out. "No Nation" carves out a nifty little niche where it feels grounded and gritty while hinging on silly genre nonsense, and director/co-writer Jeffrey Elmont seems to know it, having characters ask why they're doing the elaborate rugby ritual rather than something more sensible.

The reason, of course, is that the rugby ritual is cool, which is both why we watch these movies and how the guy in charge exerts control. The audience feels the excitement of it even if they don't necessarily have a rooting interest; Elmont and company reveal details as the combatants play rather than do an explanation ahead of time, throwing a monkey wrench into it just as the viewers understand. At that point, there's no satisfaction in anyone being hoisted by their own petard, and part of what makes the finale feel honest is that there's a lesson there but one maybe can't be sure people will take the right one to heart.

"Weird to Be Human"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

Sometimes, watching science fiction, I'll groan at "back in the bad old days of the Twentieth Century, we did this, and though we say we've outgrown it…" dialogue, even if delivered with intense earnestness by William Shatner or Patrick Stewart, but I feel like I'd kind of welcome it in "Weird to Be Human". Part of that is that we're in "AI is more human than human" territory, a bit strained as AI makes things in everyday life dumber, and part is because many folks in the present who could do with a fable about how the government chooses who is eligible for citizenship and makes them jump through tortuous hoops to obtain it are isolated from the process and could maybe use the linkages.

All that is in "Weird to Be Human", but you may have to know it's there to see it. Happily, it's got a nicely unsettling "one dystopian room to decorate in budget Cronenberg fashion" aesthetic, the sort of performances where a viewer can settle in and change their impression of who is supposed to be the audience surrogate and who is supposed to be the monster over the film's running time, and just enough memory of being behind the Iron Curtain and having resurgent right-wing movements for everyone involved to know of what they speak. The small cast handles their parts quite nicely, willing to sound alien and odd but let their inner humanity come through, for better or worse.


"Fingerprints of the Gods"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

I wonder, a bit, to what extent a character named "Monkey" was intended to make one think of some sort of trickster deity at first, even though we're probably more in "at a typewriter" territory in this short, as a reporter is given a story that makes him question the foundations of the universe.

"Fingerprints" is nice-looking - I particularly liked the precise layout of Monkey's apartment inside a run-down building - but it kind of falls prey to what hobbles a lot of simulation-theory stories, where there's not exactly much the folks discovering that they live inside a simulation that may be shut down can do about it, and for all that director Wei Zhenfeng talks about being inspired by the Mandelbrot Set, he never quite finds a way to blow audience minds with some sort of fractal revelation of simulations within simulations. It's a nicely-mounted short, but probably the one where specifics have faded most over the time it takes to write things up.


"Filther"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

Appearing at this moment, with its faceless protagonist, steampunk imagery and compositing where the elements don't quite seem to match, this probably draws "is this made with generative AI?" more than the "nice ambition, but maybe you're stretching a little thin" it would have gotten a couple years ago. Unfair, perhaps - nothing in the credits indicates that's the case - but it's got the feel: Some nifty ideas, a focus on aesthetics, and a story that's relatively thin, trying to be capital-E Emotional while connecting the big visuals.

I found it kind of pretty but distancing, and there's something really odd about the love story seeming to favor the match-making service over the nice girl at the shop nearby who at least seems to like him. Nothing' is really happening other than the protagonist fixing things, and for as much as the clockwork construction is kind of a soothing respite from folks being mean to him and the general tumult among the normies, the movie isn't doing much more than showing pretty pictures to earn a happy ending.


Tian long ba bu (The Battle Wizard)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Retro, laser DCP)
Where to stream it(Prime link), or order the 2009 DVD at Amazon

The Battle Wizard may not be one of those Shaw Brothers flicks with a surprising seed of greatness in it, but it's awesome beyond its campiness, diving into one weird thing after another, barely considering the possibility of slowing down.

Twenty years ago, Qin Hongmian (Gam Lau) informed her lover Tuan Chengchun (Si Wai) that she was two months pregnant and telling her husband that it was his wasn't really an option, since he'd been away for six months, That husband (Shih Chung-Tien) chose an inopportune moment to return and attack Chengchun, only to discover that the latter's kung fu is so powerful he can shoot energy blasts from his fingers. Oh, and Chengchun is a prince who already has a fiancée (Hung Ling-Ling) who dismisses Hongmian in the bitchiest fashion possible. So it's no wonder that Hongmian spends her daughter's entire childhood teaching her kung fu so that Mu Wangqing ("Tanny" Tien Ni) can seek revenge on her father, his wife, and any offspring they may have produced. The trouble is, Chengchun's sun Tuan Yu (Danny Lee Sau-Yin) is a pacifistic scholar who has no desire to learn martial arts, which means he'd be in big trouble after stepping out to prove to his father that one just needs words if he didn't meet pretty snake handler Cheng Ling'er (Lin Chen-Chi), as Hongmian's husband has been hiding out, biding his time and training a disciple to assassinate Yu as well.

It's a lot happening and it's about an inch deep, sure, but like the best Shaw Brothers martial arts films, there is just enough earnestness in that inch to occasionally surprise, whether it's the look of shock as Hongmian realizes she's been abandoned or how enough friendship develops between Wangqing and Yu that the filmmakers aren't just teasing incest (amusingly and coincidentally, this special-effects-heavy film was made in part as a response to Star Wars, anticipating this twist by five and a half years). No matter how frantic and silly things get, the cast gets to make their roles more than ciphers notable for their fighting styles.

They're fighting a lot, of course, but there's a good balance to the violence that alternates between splatstick and good wire fu. The filmmakers go to town with all the visual effects and fantasy that mid-1970s Shaw Brothers can muster, complete with finger guns, rubber monsters, and a guy in a thoroughly unconvincing gorilla suit. The action choreographed by Tong Kai mixes up swordplay, punching and kicking, and what is effectively gunfighting fairly well, so that combatants aren't just posing at each other, and things get enjoyably gross as limbs get blasted off (leading to characters running around on iron chicken legs) or Lee Sau-Yin seems to have a good time playing Tuan Yu as surprised by the martial-arts moves he gets by drinking magic snake's blood.

It's got a nice pace to it, too, introducing a new absurdity just often enough to get audiences saying sure, why not, rather than feeling overloaded. It's maybe a bit too much by the end - there are points when I was thinking it's been too long since we checked in on the cute snake girl, and I suspect a subplot about where her family fits into all this was cut until the film needed more bodies for the ending battles - but it goes down smooth and never stops amusing for its whole 77 minutes.

And, honestly, what else do you want? The Battle Wizard is determined to entertain from start to finish, and it's a gas all the way through.


Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Animation Plus, laser DCP)
Where to stream Tamala 2010 (Prime link), or pre-order the disc at Amazon

Sometime asked if seeing the first movie made this 23-year-later sequel better and I had to say, maybe, although it's been 20 years and I really should have bought and watched the new disc as soon as this was announced a part of the festival, the way I often do when sequels drop after this sort of wait. This could go up or down, depending on how that plays for me when I see it again.

(You're already talking to the distributor, right, Ned?)

As it opens, one-year-old kitten Tamala is just hanging around the run-down, graffiti-covered Cat Tokyo, popping in to visit her boyfriend Michaelangelo, a private detective and handyman who has just been hired to find someone who vanished a couple weeks ago, on 7 July, and while it seems like Tamala wouldn't be much help, she knows people, and they soon find video footage of him vanishing into thin air - and not only that, the same thing happened to six other cats that same night, forming a pattern across Cat Japan that matches a constellation. Meanwhile, a one-eyed mercenary named Blur is tracking occult occurrences around Cat Earth, many of which seem to lead back to Tamala herself.

I don't know that vaguely remembered details of Tamala 2010 really helped - they basically had me expecting this to be kind of unnervingly sexy, which didn't seem to be much of a factor after the start - and I kind of think loose continuity is kind of explicit here. Tamala is described as a 1-year-old kitten despite this movie taking place 20 years later than the first. It is, perhaps, a sort of meta-commentary on the state of media, with corporate entities behind the scenes managing cycles of destruction and rebirth, with the Real End lurking. The punk, anti-capitalist characters of the first film reappear somewhat jarringly toward the end, though their message is somewhat muted.

There's a lot of movie to get through before that material really takes center stage, though, and the long middle is seldom nearly as fun as the apocalyptic finale or watching literal sex kitten Tamala (seemingly what you'd get if you gene-spliced Betty Boop and Hello Kitty) tags along on Michaelangelo's missing person case. Tamala herself is in short supply for a while, and none of the other characters who get more involved with the plot are as memorable or fun, with the story itself more atmosphere than developments that pull an audience closer.

Like the last one, though, it looks and sounds amazing, a run-down retro future with great character designs, touching camera, and nifty music and sound the baseline . The mostly B&W look hits the direct spot where manga, film noir, and the Fleischer Brothers overlap. Tamala's cheerful dancing and bouncy walk (accompanied by squeaky boings to make one wonder if she's wearing leather all the time) give way to unsettling violence, and while I suspect that much of the film was realized digitally, writer/director/composers "T.O.L." really lean into that in the final act with a robotic cat god whose obvious CGI nature makes her incursion into Cat Earth almost Lovecraftian.

So, yes, going to see this again, and looking forward to it. It's crazy stuff, probably about 40% nonsense even if you've recently caught up on all previous Tamala material, but fun and energetic nonsense.