Fantasia 2026.03: Anime no Bento '26, Break Free, and Unidentified Murder

Pardon if today seems a little more scattered than usual; I left the apartment without my little five-inch square notebook and so wasn't making notes through most of the day, and that's not great when the first couple films of the day are Japanese shorts and new releases; Japanese studios just do not update English-friendly movie databases and there's a lag on the crowd-sourcing as well. I eventually wound up hitting Pharmaprix to grab pen and paper for the last show, but wasn't quick-thinking enough to record or photograph the English credits of Break Free.

Anyway, late start because the early afternoon was filled with panels and such more than screenings, so we kick off at the Museum with the Anime no Bento package:

Five filmmakers for seven films from Japan is a pretty decent turnout, although the scheduling meant there wouldn't be time for a Q&A - these packages are soon after the "My First Fantasia" shows, and genre festival staff in a museum cinema might not exactly specialize in getting families with kids in and out - so there was little time to do more than introduce director Taka Yuki from "Don't Dodge Life", "20001 An Earth Odyssey" creator Taiki Sakurai, "Echo" filmmaker Asuka Dokai, "Foxing" director Takeru Shinokuza, and Eit Mitsufuchi, who did basically everything on "Dust of the Simulacrum".

It didn't quite run late enough to bump into Break Free, with producer Yusuke Suzuki (CHECK), star Akito Fujii, and writer/ director Yu Nakamoto on hand. It was a fun Q&A, even if it was one where you get the sense of how bizarre it must be to fly halfway around the world to show your movie to a huge room of people who speak two different languages from what you understand, standing in front of them while they chatter and a translator occasionally decides a question is for you. Fujii, in particular, often seems to be listening intently for something he could respond to and then giving a very amusing answer when he got the chance.

It was interesting, though, as I gather the film kind of grew from Fujii starting a TikTok where he did dances in character as a yakuza (his character's cover story in the movie), with the studio boys eventually calling Nakamoto in saying they wanted him to write and direct a movie about a dancing gangster, which sounds pretty old Hollywood for a movie built around social media! Fujii, though he's got the look of a gangster, has been dancing since he was young, and said it was a bit of a challenge to dance crappy in earlier scenes. Nakamoto, meanwhile, answered a question about directing action versus dance by noting that sometimes the work of choreography is similar, but with action you are often doing pieces at a time, often with doubles, and camera work very much plotted alongside motion, while dance is often longer shots, no doubles, and the camera reacting to something more spontaneous.

After that there was an hour and a half or so until Unidentified Murder back at the Museum, time to do a little shopping and grab a slice of pizza. I think it might be the only new Hong Kong film at the festival - Blades of the Guardians probably belongs more to the mainland and there are three archive prints/restorations - which seems kind of crazy.

Next up, another couple big gaps on Sunday with Niko, the International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, You Are the Film, and Attack on Paradise. Tuesday looks to be Big Break, Levitating, Hayop Ka!, Someone's Daughter, and either Los Vampires or Solo, depending what the release plans for the former look like.

(And here's a look at how the sausage gets made if you're without a notebook or a pen but know you're not going to remember who is who the next day!)

"Echo"

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

One from the "cute fantastical representation" school of animated shorts, "Echo" has a pair of twin children traversing a strange landscape, having crashed there in unusual escape pods of sorts, eager to meet their mother, with one more daring and apparently boasting greater stamina than the other. The twist is that they are as yet unborn, and in the outside world, their mother is not doing well, having lost her husband not long after discovering she was pregnant.

It's a lovely movie to look at, with cute designs that walk up to the border of perhaps overly whimsical without quite crossing it. I'm kind of torn on how directly I'd like weekdays happening with the twins to represent what's going on with the mother - they feel very disconnected here, but link them closer and suddenly there are implications best not examined!


"Future Kid Takara Episode 1: The Child From the Future"

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

This is very clearly built for children, which is no bad thing, but it can be kind of hard to parse as an adult as a result. It's bright and earnest and full of entertaining designs and transformations, but is it too simplistic? Tough to judge, as an adult, especially without seeing more of the series. Little kids do need introductions to the idea of climate change, though, and they might as well be plain-spoken.

This one looks pretty cute, like it will combine fun adventure with good information, and I kind of love that the girl Takara meets in the past/our present looks like she might be an over-enthusiastic chaos source. The opening has a really nice vibe that feels a bit like it's trying be a bit of a spoof of the sort of thing parents thought was fun as a kid while also trying to be that thing for a new generation.


"20001 An Earth Odyssey"

☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

I am here for the joke about "it must have been used for religious rituals" in any form, which is good, because it basically does three of them as a family of alien archeologists examine a playground on an earth where humans have died out. It's a very fine example of how, if a joke is solid enough and you can tweak the execution just enough, there's a lot to work with.

The style of it is admittedly a bit after my time; in American terms it looks like NickToons from the 1990s or so. I suspect that it hits a sweet spot for kids and adults younger than me, even if the main 2001 reference is kind of corny.


"Don't Dodge Life"

☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

This one's a visually interesting bit of animation, although it probably makes a bit more effort reaching for profundity than it can really manage. Making the abstract concept of life a character can't help but oversimplify something that the other protagonist and potentially the viewer is really struggling with, and filmmaker Taka Yuki seems to struggle with what to do with the idea to make this a story.


"Ambivalent Garden"

Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

Two days later, I don't recall anything about this one at all, despite the description and images on the site's pages being striking! Did I nap?


"Foxing: Kitsuné-tsuki"

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

Write-what-you-know shorts can be dangerous, because they often reveal just how much young artists are pouring into their art to the exclusion of everything else. That's a bit of a weight on "Foxing" for a while, as filmmaker Takeru Shinozuka's avatar Shinano mopes about her work as an animator and how she feels unworthy in a way that's both familiar and also kind of tough to swallow for animation-lovers. We've seen young artists work themselves into and out of funks before, especially with some well-placed encouragement.

Still, the execution is really nice, especially once we meet her kitsune doodle come to life, Koyami. The expected metaphor reveal doesn't have quite so much pressure on it because Shinano has already commented on how much she's like a kitsune in some ways, but I really like the way Koyami is both pure ego and merciless criticism; She's obviously going to be an aspect of Shinano when the mask comes off, but I really like how Shinozuka doesn't separate these traits out into dueling avatars, because not only are both necessary for creating art, but they are more intertwined than usually presented.


"Dust of the Simulacrum"

☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

Filmmaker Eit Mitsufuchi pitched "Dust of the Simulacrum" as, among other things, an argument for working in the 3D CGI medium when the animation industry in Japan is still very much focused on a traditional style, but kind of seems a little too meta about it at times? It's not ReBoot or anything, but it's a lost video game character trying to dodge "bugs" that are overrunning a blank landscape, and I don't know if it ever gets beyond being too on-the-nose.

Oddly enough, it's a case where the human characters look nice enough but the bugs look like they could use a little refinement (although, potentially, to look jankier rather than more realistic), and it's another one where what's going on doesn't quite carry the ambition the filmmakers are trying to project.


Odore! Yakuza (Break Free)

☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Break Free opens with text about how Japan's crackdown on organized crime has more or less crippled the yakuza as a force in Japanese life, and if it goes further, one wonders what the effect will be on pop culture. There will be movies like this, chronicling the fall in ways both serious and comic, but will there eventually be nostalgia for it? As much as filmmaker Yu Nakamoto has a great deal of sympathy for his characters, that doesn't extend to bolstering the institution, which is probably a part of what makes it work.

In it, Kunio (Akito Fujii) is 38 and has been a yakuza for twenty years, but the business of organized crime is not great - he's working as a food delivery driver and longtime comrades are struggling as mascots and trying to catfish - beyond how everybody is filming everything these days and it's very easy to get caught doing violence in public. Insulted by a lack of respect by a civilian, he improvises a sort of dance thing where he doesn't quite hit the guy, and it racks up millions of views. The gang decides to monetize this - an odd scheme where Kunio will present himself online as an influencer who is just cosplaying as a gangster, though the intimidation going on in the background is real - but he'll need some better moves, which means taking classes with former background dancer Marie. She, of course, is very cute, and Kunio starts to wonder if he wants more than a life of crime, even as a less organized but more vicious gang makes a play for their territory.

There's a song and dance man inside every tough guy actor - they weren't doing film noir and kung fu in high school drama class - but I don't know that anyone since James Cagney has really had the chance to be both, no matter how much Hugh Jackman wants to. It's treated as a bit of a joke when they do, and both Break Free and the TikTok channel of star Akito Fujii which inspired the film are playing on the incongruity of a guy who looks like Fujii dancing, but the joke hits so well at its best. Fujii's muscles are not quite bulky but he's not exactly wiry, and even when Kunio cleans up, he kind of looks and sounds like a schlub, so it's genuinely entertaining to see him suddenly move with seeming abandon (though I'm not sure he ever becomes quite so competitive in the dance battles as the plot requires him to be), or have the film suddenly double back and remind you of the gangster life he's trying to hide.

Not that I'd dream of spoiling those moments, especially when the best are a couple layers of absurdity deep, but they bring forth an explosion of laughter, enough to get past how a lot of the movie around them isn't quite so brilliant, coasting a lot on how good the high concept is rather than how any of the details fit together. At their best, though, the filmmakers are great at sending up how goofy something is and then doing a quick pivot to this other very silly thing, catching someone who is just making fun of the one element off guard as the thing they like better isn't spared.

And, underneath it all, this all works because it feels true that the violence of the yakuza is a dead end, even without the steps that the government is taking so that gangsters can't participate in legitimate society. The organization is dying and success requires one to either be completely monstrous (true or not, the yakuza often tried to present themselves as a useful part of society) or otherwise make oneself miserable. Being the kind of gangster Kunio and his friends see themselves as is not manly in the way it once was. Dance isn't either, but there's joy in it if not money or glory, and that's got more value than posturing like a gangster.

The movie fizzles a bit at times, Nakamoto may show violence as ultimately ineffective and obsolete, but he can't quite create the triumphant dance moment that the film needs at or near its climax. It's great fun to watch Fujii play against apparent type, though, enough for the best moments to carry the rest.


Unidentified Murder

☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

There's a fun bit at the end of Unidentified Murder where a newscaster is trying to recap what has come before and seems to feel that relating this idiocy is below her dignity, and she's kind of right, but the trick of the film is that, for all we the audience knows what was going on is screwy, it's not quite something that can be dismissed until the movie has finished walking right up to the line.

25 years ago, three kids went out to play and only two came back, saying their friend had been abducted by a UFO. 25 years ago Mark (Ling Man-Lung) and Kit (Ronald Lam) are going on some internet UFO programs to talk about how their friend Ho vanished, laughing dismissively at a host (Kenny Wong) bringing up how it was rumored they killed him. Mark's girlfriend Lau Man (Renci Yeung), who does YouTube pranks on Mark regularly, decides to hire an actor, Kim Chi-Fei, (Peter Chan) to pretend to be Ho and meet them at the site of the disappearance on the 25th anniversary, but, uh, why did Mark and Kit bring shovels - were they going to dig something up?

Suffice it to say, the film has a few more chances to bounce back in time to show what was really going on, adding more layers to its deceptions as it goes. The key, though, is that while Kim is in the middle of all this an explicitly hired to fake something, he is absolutely the most open and earnest character in the group, trying to come up with motivations for his character with three lines as he invested himself completely into something that Man has apparently put about seven seconds of thought into. He's a simple character but never really dumb; Peter Chan does an exceptional job of giving this oddball the right human frustrations.

The whole cast is like that, and it's impressive how, even as the film gleefully reveals how the audience doesn't have the whole story and things aren't as they seem, nobody in the cast has to completely switch things up and say that you were lied to. These folks are, by and large, pretty simple young folks and content creators who haven't grown into something more substantial, but even Renci Yeung's shallow YouTuber makes sense as a person and garners affection beyond not deserving to be murdered.

By the time it's finished, the screenplay has piled a lot of "here's something I didn't tell you before but which changes everything!" on, with some chips investigating the scene besides, but it remains clear and surprisingly linear, dishing out the new information at just the right time to not have to do a lot of sleight-of-hand to keep things out of the audience's sight. The chases and reveals go quick enough to keep things moving without there ever being much risk of missing anything, whether joke or information.

Filmmakers Kwok Ka-Hei and Jack Lee Chun-Kit have a good handle on how to thrive at this scale; the film sort of feels knowingly small, with roughly three or four locations, and doesn't try to trick the audience into it feeling bigger. The movie seems to speak the language of both classic farce and modern media-savvy internet video well, and gets good laughs from each of its about faces.

Fantasia 2026.02: Trauma or, Monsters All; "Yucky Guy"; Dance Freak; "Cardigan"; Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant; and Blaise

I started the day by misreading the time for Trauma or, Monsters All as 1:45pm rather than 1:15pm, which means when I got there at 1:30pm, the film was just starting because it had a nice long intro. I occasionally complain about that sort of thing causing films to bump into each other, but in this case it worked out for me, so I'll try not to whine later!

It did mean there wasn't a whole lot of time for the post-film Q&A with DP Sharif El Neklawy, producers Tilson Allen-Merry & Gaby Leyner, actress Aitana Doyle, and writer/director/editor/producer/co-star Larry Fessenden. One thing that sort of made my eyebrows go up but wasn't followed up on was that he called it "a late film and maybe a last film", which is a bit surprising - though a lot of folks are thinking about retiring at his age, artists generally have another decade or two in them - but as a producer, I suspect he knows the reality of his viability as a director. Horror's often a young person's game, and one of the things he did was thank Doyle and the other younger cast members for pointing out when he was behind the times, which she laughed at in a "yeah, we had to do that" way (as opposed to "Larry's just being silly and self-deprecating").

It was also apparently an unusually tricky shoot, even though he lives in the town where he shot it - not only did he have to find two houses right next to each other that had the right properties, but co-star Alex Breaux was doing Stranger Things on Broadway, which means he was only available to shoot on Mondays. It also meant getting the cast of Depraved and Blackout together, and while I suspect it's not as hard as it might be if you're based in New York and have a lot of friends like Fessenden, but with that schedule it's probably some work. That's also where he mentioned that James Le Gros doesn't really like horror, but they go back.

Next up: Justine Smith with Dance Freak director/DP Alan Resnick and director/writer/actor Robby Rackleff, and I must admit, though I like Justine a lot, when she's hosting a screening, it's probably the Underground section she programs, and that's kind of an empty-slot choice for me most of the time. I've enjoyed some, but that's getting lucky.

Anyway, I didn't really like their movie, and I sort of enjoyed their Q&A mostly as a comedy act where Resnick was the pro trying to make his friend look good. Sometimes you just aren't quite sure whether folks making a movie like this and taking it to festivals did it as a lark and are enjoying the ride even if they're kind of out of their depth, sort of contemptuous in an "I can't believe you paid money for this thing we crapped out" way, or doing a bit. It's usually the first, but, man, can this sort of thing not be my sort of thing.

Next up, crossing the street and having writer/actor Hans Obma of "CARDIGAN!" ask how many of us have ever heard Welsh, and, you know, I don't know if I've ever seen a short or a feature in Welsh before. His was fun!

It played before Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant, with "THUNDERLIPS" - Jordan Windsor (holding the alien baby) & Sean Wallace, because I guess music video guys have to also be named like a band - talking about how, yeah, it is kind of odd that a couple of dudes were making a movie about pregnancy and childbirth. Windsor pointed out that, once you have a kid (even as a father), you find out that every woman has some sort of horrific pregnancy story, and they made sure that they got a lot of outside input while making their film, and they requested to get more questions from folks who weren't dudes when the first few were guys. Aside from that, they mentioned that it took a circuitous path to production - they wrote a feature script, got told that it would sell easier with a short, so they pulled ten pages out, made a short, brought that to a Melbourne film market, and then got to make the feature. Hannah Lynch stars in both, and they said they cast her in large part because her personality is fairly close to Mary.

After that, I had some time to kill before heading up to the Museum for Blaise, amused to overhear in line that Nicolas Winding Refn had been at the Ultraman documentary because he's a major fan.

Next up, an oddly late start on Saturday with some gaps as it's mostly events before the "Anime no Bento" package, then Break Free and Unidentified Murder; Sunday looks like Niko, the International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, You Are the Film, and Attack on Paradise, with Blades of the Guardians, Pontypool, and Redline all recommended. Just a coupleof those weird days where you've got to stay in one screen to maximize movies but I'm apparently building in meal breaks.


Trauma or, Monsters All

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Cinema J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
One gets the feeling that Larry Fessenden had the idea for doing a crossover when he realized that Blackout would mean he'd directed vampire, Frankenstein, and werewolf pictures, but didn't necessarily have a great story when he started doing the work of a producer to bring people back, and one didn't come together when the schedules lined up. That probably makes the whole thing a little more meta than intended, with everyone sort of aware that they're in a monster mashup even if they're not quite winking at the camera.

He returns us to Talbot Falls, where historian Cassandra (Laëtitia Hollard) has moved looking for some quiet as she begins a book on George Washington Carver, taking a job in the library and making friends with Agnes (Aitana Doyle). Having read about the werewolf incident that took place a couple years ago, she begins to suspect that her next-door neighbor who locks himself in the basement during the full moon is actually Charley (Alex Hurt), whom everyone presumes is dead. Reading up a little more suggests that his housemate Adam (Alex Breaux) is the Frankenstein's monster that was said to beset a neighboring town a couple years earlier (in Depraved). Wanting to write about something in the present rather than from a hundred years ago, she pitches an editorial to the local paper about how the trauma of those events is like monsters in their midst, though Charley's girlfriend Sharon (Addison Timlin) is looking to get into contact with him. Not only does that raise the hackles of a lot of people who don't like an outsider coming in and trying to analyze them, but things like that get online these days, which attracts the attention of a biotech investor (Joshua Leonard) who has been looking for Adam, but also Sam (Larry Fessenden), who became a vampire 30 years earlier and is intrigued at the idea of other monsters relatively nearby.

If Sam's presence sounds kind of odd, it is; when Fessenden mentioned that this might be his next project after Blackout played the festival three years ago, it sounded like he intended to have Meredith Snaider from Habit return as Anna, but he apparently could not track her down or interest her in participating. I'm not sure she would have been a better fit, although the tone might have been different, since the exposition and "let me expound upon some themes" moments carry a different weight coming from the very recognizable writer/director of the film playing an earthier character than Snaider's Anna. Even taking that into account, there are an awful lot of people status-dumping more than conversing or acting, after doing things that the film needs even if they don't arise naturally, jawing about where things stand in the aftermath of Blackout, with Cassandra also spending a lot of time worrying about the book she's writing in a way that doesn't always feel like it connects to the rest of the story (and boy howdy, do people comment on how she's telling uncomfortable truths while being named "Cassandra" a few times). It's a scenario in search of a plot. Fessenden is kind of onto something in terms of poking around the idea of trauma and recovery, likening the end of a horror movie to a mass shooting/casualty event that scars a place and attracts outsiders trying to use it for their often good-natured but insensitive ends, but mostly winds up restating it rather than developing it.

He's put together a nice cast, though, especially in terms of the newcomers - young leads Laëtitia Hollard and Aitana Doyle are really charming, and although it can sometimes feel a little frustrating, there's something very real and earnest about the way Hollard's Cassandra naively stumbles and repeatedly uses "I'm just connecting what's already out there" as a shield. A hangout movie with Hollard and Doyle as these characters would be quite enjoyable, and that really helps when wheels are mostly turning in the background. The returning folks do a fair job of sketching out who they are in a little time, possibly enough that the exposition and flashbacks could have been cut back a bit. Alex Breaux is a standout as Adam, playing kind of simple and brain-damaged without doing Karloff or struggling to get words out to hammer that home.

There's a fair amount to keep track of happening kind of randomly, even if there's not a whole lot of actual horror movie action and gore for most of the film, with what there is feeling a bit obligatory even if it's well-executed. Even the climax seems like something a movie has to do rather than entirely where threads were heading, although Fessenden earns the emotions his finale is aiming to stir when they finally hit.

Would a little more time ruminating on the script have made Trauma a more fitting climax to 30 years of Fessenden putting his spin on classic monsters, or was the idea always more enticing than what could be pulled together from the previous three movies?


"Yucky Guy"
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Cinema J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)

What can I say, this is a sort of absurdity that doesn't really connect with me at all; I keep waiting for it go somewhere but it's really "'people sleeping through chaos in their grand but featureless mansion', 'dogs wearing diapers', and "tresspasser pees to mark territory' are funny" and not a whole lot else. I mean, sure, they are funny, but once the concept has presented itself, I just want a bit more than this movie does.

It's also 13 minutes long, and it kind of makes me think about how a lot of people don't necessarily need something to be funny to laugh, but it's sort of their default way of breaking tension, and a lot of this sort of comedy seems to confuse effect with cause.


Dance Freak

* * (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Cinema J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)

A thing about a lot of "Underground" movies is that they're not just acquired tastes that may not match one's sense of humor or kink, but they are often actively unpleasant to watch under a lot of circumstances, such as sitting close to the front of the auditorium for Dance Freak. It's a grainy black-and-white film with frequent strobing made by viral-video specialists and probably meant to be viewed on a tablet or maybe a television, a contained rectangle rather than the entirety of what one can see. It's harsh to look at and the filmmakers don't really give an audience a lot of reasons to do that.

It introduces us to Obie (Robby Rackleff), a sort of sad sack whose girlfriend Dorty (Megan Koester) is running for office and starting to explicitly leave him behind rather than just by implication, and who is apparently mainly employed because everyone else at the office has forgotten how to access systems. He's trying to take up birdhouse building as a hobby, but it's not going that well. That's about the time when the Dance Freak starts showing up, somehow hypnotizing folks and deflating them while they are in their trance. A scientist at the lab where it was created, Dr. Dilly Gorgul (Sheila Mears) tells Obie it "looks just like you but is a separate entity" and then runs for the wasteland, mostly leaving Obie and Dorty to handle the situation.

Filmmakers Robby Rackleff & Alan Resnick give Obie the sort of surreal micro-budget film world where things are sort of empty and eccentric where we can see it though there are hints that it gets truly bizarre just out of sight, and that's good for a few good gags at worst and a fairly constant stream of chuckles if your mileage varies in that direction. The trick is often finding something that sounds not quite right in a particular way, such as names like "Obie" and "Dorty" and "Gorgul", and saying them with a straight face. It's easy to milk jokes like that too far; a street gang called "the Salad Boys" earns a chuckle when the name is tossed out but fizzles quickly when they try to play the gag much longer. A lot of the movie is deadpan where the silence after a joke without a punchline is held too long or they keep going, sure there's a bit that will convince someone that this is funny.

If the jokes in this sort of movie don't land, it can still work if there's something interesting to grab onto, but that's seldom the case here. Obie and Dorty are not particularly personable either individually or as a pair, and the idea of the Dance Freak doesn't quite coalesce, either as an awkward expression of Obie trying to feel joy or him draining/feeling drained by the world. It's like a whole movie based on the snidest reading of Peter Parker dancing like a dork in Spider-Man 3, and by the end, the storytelling is muddled - it's Obie's story, but he's out of action, and the chemistry between Obie and Dorty isn't enough to let her work as the lead later on.

There are a couple of bright spots - Sheila Mears actually gets to make Gorgul a character, giving a bit of a "knows what danger looks like" edge to her ivory-tower dorkiness - but I seldom found it funny enough to be worth looking at.


"Cardigan"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

I don't want to belabor how much I enjoyed "Cardigan"; it's a five-minute short that doesn't quite have one joke but leans on its main gag enough that parsing it in a review can deflate it. But, as such things go, it's executed very well: Writer Hans Obma and Lois Meleri Jones hit the right notes as a couple that the audience can identify with when faced with something unfair but also just privileged enough that we feel like they may have something coming; Iwan John and Bethany Williams-Potter are an enjoyable odd couple as the police officers the run afoul of. The main joke of just how much this town identifies with its namesake clothing is goofily absurd and pivots to something that delivers a wry grin at the end.

It's a five-minute comedy sketch, but it's a good one.


Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Where the short that preceded Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant is adroit with its gag, the feature uses a sledgehammer, but it's got a target that can use a good sledging and seemingly never forgets something that a lot of absurd comedies forget, including one I saw earlier in the day: Make everything as weird as you want, because people and situations are weird, but do it by pushing something very familiar to an extreme that one can still recognize.

So we meet Mary (Hannah Lynch), nearly 30 and still living with her mother Cynthia (Yvette Parsons), who simultaneously harangues her for being a layabout but also doesn't give her any space whatsoever. Mary's got an odd kink in that she really enjoys tentacle hentai, which brings us to the neighbors, whom we meet as Ann (Jackie van Beek) tries to get her son Boo (Arlo Green) to do something other than masturbate in his room, seeing as that causes the power to flicker. When Mary and Boo bump into each other in the laundry room, she discovers that Boo was conceived when his mother was abducted by aliens, and he has the glorious tentacled genitalia of her dreams. They only agree to masterbate, but, well, his jizz is powerful, spraying across the room and dissolving her pants - and, apparently, alien fetuses grow faster than Mary can convince people she wants no part of being a mother.

Writer Jordan Mark Windsor and his co-director Sean Wallace don't mess around, letting the audience see what Boo's got between his legs in the first ten or fifteen minutes rather than playing coy, and it's kind of a brave decision, because it's going to be a while before they can really escalate from that sort of prosthetic weirdness. They don't retreat from it - among all the other fluids, Mary's morning sickness is a colorful, gooey mess - but it's not quite the movie where they're going to try to top the last crazy thing you saw every ten minutes, although when the climax comes, it's great, just as weirdly practical and weirdly organic as one might hope after setting the bar high at the beginning.

Part of the point may be to get a big early laugh that hooks the audience - this movie is weird and gross enough that its theatrical run might be limited, so you've got to give the folks streaming it something to whet their appetites at the start - but I suspect that part of it is how frankness is the engine driving the movie, and spending the next hour and a half letting the audience see all the ways pregnancy can wreak havoc on a woman's turned up to 11 isn't really compatible with getting cute about just what put Mary in this position. Windsor & Wallace are careful never to be scolding; Mary wears her kink on her sweatshirt even if she doesn't want her mother, Boo, or anything else all up in her business, and folks being matter-of-fact about things is seldom played as foolish. There's not really a villain here - all these people are trying to do their best by Mary and Boo even as they're confused and trying to act normal in the face of it, despite the situation being pretty darn abnormal.

The cast sells that great, especially Hannah Lynch, whose Mary is annoyed and sarcastic and winds up snapping at a lot of people but seldom comes off as mean; she's probably funny if weird under better circumstances. She bounces off Yvette Parsons's Cynthia well, the latter always seeming to take up extra space with a working class accent that you can see as a constant embarrassment to Mary. Cynthia herself is a contrast to Ann, all reserve and fear that puts a quiver in her voice when she tries to protect authority. Arlo Green gives a really nifty performance, exaggeratedly reserved and tentative at the start, but in a way audiences will quickly buy into, but doing a nice job of coming out of his shell as having an actual friend and a sense of responsibility displace shame.

The secret sauce might be the small army of folks playing doctors, nurses, pharmacists and the like who all deliver the right blend of disbelief, surprise, curiosity, and ultimately professionalism in the face of this bizarre pregnancy. As much fun as the gnarly practical effects are, a lot of what makes the movie work minute to minute is the mix of how health care can be an impossible bureaucracy to navigate despite being filled with individuals who mostly want to make things better on the one hand and how this crisis clarifies who these four people are, especially to themselves.

And it's impressively gross.


Blaise

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia Animation Plus, DCP)
Buy the original book en français at Amazon

Blaise is kind of a weird-looking movie, not quite the CGI equivalent of animating mouth movement onto photographs, but residing in a very particular spot in the uncanny valley where a still looks like it might be live action but looks more and more unreal and off-putting as you stare or watch it in motion, and that's the movie in a nutshell: Seemingly-relatable cringe comedy that gets very weird, very quickly, but still has the chops to get some big laughs.

Blaise Sauvage (voice of Timéo) is 16 and friendless at high school because he's more than a bit weird, but comes by it honestly - father Jacques (voice of Jacques Gamblin) is a ball of neurosis and mother Carole (voice of Léa Drucker) has a real knack for saying the wrong thing and being absolutely unable to explain her error and recover. They try to get him to reconnect with the daughter of Carole's friend Marisa, which leads to him getting dragged along to a party and protest where he meets Joséphine (voice of Nina Blanc-Francard), who crushes on him immediately but both make things needlessly complicated by pretending to be something they're not.

The film is co-written and co-directed by Dimitri Planchon, who created the original bandes dessinée, and it feels very much like a certain style of comics: It's made of a lot of little vignettes, as likely to end with a sort of unnerving ambiguity as a punchline, which helps the movie bounce around a bit, rather than get mired in the boringly serious moments that connect one funny bit to the next, very helpful for this sort of dry, French comedy where what's functional could dilute what's deadpan or transgressive without the viewer quite realizing why it's not as funny throughout as it could be.

That deadpan style puts a fair amount of responsibility on the voice cast, since the animation isn't going to help out with wild takes very often, so there's got to be a fair amount of nuance. Jacques Gamblin is maybe the standout, giving Jacques a sort of soft-spoken nervousness that adds to the slightly shaggy image on the screen, while Léa Drucker makes sure Carole seems (over) confident at home and then brings a hint of panic to her voice that doesn't quite contradict the professional mien at work. Timéo's performance as Blaise is kind of flatter, an introverted teenage drone, while Nina Blanc-Francard does a good poor little rich girl, sympathetic even as she's often kind of awful.

That all makes the film sound kind of small, offering a chuckle or two at most, but Planchon, co-writer Clémence Lebatteux, and co-director Jean-Paul Guigue both make sure that the film has outstanding timing and a satirical punch, often positioning the Sauvage's petty concerns against angry protesters in a way that makes the family look petty and thus more absurd even as a lot of the radicals are plenty ridiculous in their own way. There's not a misconception that they can't escalate into a disaster, with the path out of it both clear to see and impossible to take, and when all else fails, there's Chekhov's hand grenade threatening to take what is an irritation and make it literally explode.

It's a very, very funny movie, bouncing expertly between the squirms of recognition and belly-laughs of disbelief, and only enhanced by how it so often looks almost normal.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 17 July 2026 - 23 July 2026

I'm out of town so this is obviously my second priority, but the studios have fortunately made it pretty easy on me!

• The big opening is The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan's star-studded version of the classic adventure, featuring Matt Damon as Odysseus and Anne Hathaway as Penelope, plus seemingly half of Hollywood. Shot entirely on Imax film, it's getting most if not all of the premium screens in town plus a bunch of others, playing the Coolidge (70mm), the Somerville (70mm), Jordan's Furniture (Imax Friday-Sunday), West Newton, CinemaSalem, Boston Common (including 70mm & Imax Laser & Dolby Cinema & XL), Causeway Street (including XL), Kendall Square, the Seaport (including Dolby Atmos), South Bay (including Imax Xenon & Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Imax Laser & Dolby Cinema), Arsenal Yards (including CWX), and Chestnut Hill.
  
  Assembly Row has Telemundo's coverage of the World Cup on Saturday & Sunday. Mystery previews at Boston Common, Causeway Street, Kendall Square, South Bay, Assembly Row on Monday. South Bay has kids' matinees of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 Monday & Wednesday. Hadestown: The Musical opens at the Lexington Venue, West Newton, Boston Common, Causeway Street, the Kendall, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row for a five-night run starting Thursday. Concert film Sia: Nostalgic for the Present and Summer Tour, a documentary about following Dead and Company's final tour, also play Boston Common on Thursday.
• The Odyssey gets the main screen, but The Coolidge Corner Theatre also opens Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, a documentary about the Cape Cod-based poet.
  
  On top of that, the Coolidge continues alien-invasion midnights with a 35mm print of Mars Attacks! on Friday plus The Faculty on Saturday. The Marilyn Monroe Centennial celebration continues with Some Like It Hot on Sunday afternoon, with Appalachian State University Professor Kyle Stevens offering a seminar beforehand, Niagara on Tuesday, and The Asphalt Jungle on Wednesday. There's a Panorama show of documentary State of Firsts on Monday with filmmaker Chase Joynt joining remotely afterward. Sold out previews include an outdoor show of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma on Saturday and Sheep in the Box with director Hirozaku Kore-eda on hand Wednesday (just reminding you if you've got your tickets already).
• Homer crowds a lot out, so Apple Fresh Pond just has Telugu-language thriller Vadhala opening Friday for Indian films, while Telugu-language romantic comedy Oh..! Sukumari opens at Boston Common and Causeway Street. Tamil-language thriller Jana Nayagan opens at Fresh Pond Wednesday (Thursday at Causeway Street). Lenin continues at Boston Common.
  
  There's a Crunchyroll Anime Nights presentation of Mob Psycho 100 at Boston Common, the Seaport, and Assembly Row on Monday. There's a mini-30th anniversary Evangelion series, with Death (True)² & Rebirth playing Boston Common Tuesday and The End of Evangelion on Wednesday.
• After The Brattle Theatre starts the weekend with a 35mm print of Jaws to make up the ones canceled by heat a couple weeks ago. After that, it's back to The Stanton Rule: A Harry Dean Stanton Centennial with Death Watch & Christine Friday; a matinee of The Last Temptation of Christ on Saturday; a double feature of Escape From New York & Alien Saturday & Monday; and a double feature of Paris, Texas and Pretty in Pink on Sunday. Starting Tuesday, they're closed to replace the seats for 10 days, which coincides nicely with the Red Line being shut down between Alewife and Park Street.
• The Capitol Theatre has Fear Strikes Out, starring Anthony Perkins as Red Sox outfielder Jimmy Piersall, for "Play Ball!" on Friday.
  
  For at least the first few weeks of their run of The Odyssey, The Somerville Theatre will be using the big projector for the Saturday midnight special with The Dark Crystal on 70mm film Saturday night..
• The Seaport Alamo has "Kids Camp" matinees of Flow Friday & Monday, and the 2004 The Phantom of the Opera Sunday/Tuesday/Wednesday Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture and Sally Potter's Orlando play separately on Monday, and there's a Movie Party show of Steel Magnolias on Wednesday.
• WBUR's CitySpace screens The Thomas Crown Affair '68 with writers Sean Burns & Hank Phillippi Ryan discussing the film afterward on Friday night as part of their "Set in Boston" series.
• Landmark Kendall Square has Back to the Future. on Tuesday for the Big Screen/Amblin summer movie and The Dark Night on Wednesday for Christopher Nolan Wednesdays.
• Hopefully it's not too smokey for outdoor screenings this week, with Joe's Free Films and others showing The Muppet Movie at the MIT Open Space, Angry Birds 2 at CambridgeSide, and The Minecraft Movie at the Hatch Shell on Friday; Zootopia 2 at the Urban Park Roof Garden in Cambridge Saturday; Surf's Up at TimeOut Market on Monday and at the Boston Harbor Shipyard on Tuesday; and Mean Girls at Lincoln Park in Somerville on Thursday.
• The Museum of Science has The Odyssey on the Giant Screen Friday & Saturday, and folks can RSVP to see the animated How to Train Your Dragon on the 25th as part of Disability Pride month.
• The Lexington Venue is open all week but Mpnday with Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, Tuner, and The Odyssey. Noir He Walked By Night has a free show Saturday morning, documentary Dear Lara plays with group discussion afterward on Wednesday, and they get the Hadestown run starting Thursday.
  
  The West Newton Cinema opens The Odyssey and Rose of Nevada, keeping Moana, The Invite, Time and Water, Minions & Monsters, and The Sheep Detectives. So far, they're only listing Hadestown for Thursday.
  
  The Dedham Community Theatre has Rose of Nevada and The Invite.
  
  Cinema Salem plays The Odyssey, Evil Dead Burn, Minions & Monsters, and Toy Story 5 from Friday to Monday. The Salem Irish Film Festival continues with Kneecap on Friday, Dead Man's Money and A Want in Her on Saturday, and Horseshoe for closing night Sunday. Spooky Picture Show presents Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon on Saturday. The Wednesday Classic is The Searchers, with Weirdo Wednesday next door.

I won't be seeing any of that, instead binging at the Fantasia Festival for the rest of the month; first day's worth of reviews is already up! As much as I hope to keep up, my Letterboxd page will continue updating even as I inevitably fall behind!

Fantasia 2026.01: Her Private Hell, Tunnels: Sun in the Dark, and Kung Fu '26

 

Great to be back in Montreal, and not just because it is expected to be stupidly hot in Boston with unexpected apocalyptic air quality because of wildfires in Manitoba. We're looking at a nice 18 days of moves here!

Getting here was a bit of a thing, though - I had a 10:40am flight that was supposed to get me here by noon, and was out the door at around 7am or so, but two Red Line stations later, I realized I had forgotten my passport. By the time I got back to the apartment, I figured I should get a ride to be sure, but the first one was 12 minutes away for a half hour and seemed to be getting a block further away each time I checked. Canceled, got another one. When I arrived at the airport, I had trouble checking in at the kiosk, and the departure board said my flight was leaving early, at 10:30am, which I did not realize was possible. Apparently they both oversold it and the check-in cutoff was an hour before the flight. They got me on the next flight, which entailed a transfer in Toronto, but which didn't leave until I was stopped to arrive, which killed any plans I may have had about spending an afternoon and evening visiting favorite spots and restaurants.

Got to sit in business class on that second leg, though, which is nice, but kind of like when they started putting recliners in theaters, an almost unreasonable amount of space compared to what I'm used to. The Puritan New England's in me almost disapproves.

The lesson: Put your passport in your pants pocket the night before!

Oddly, the first press screening was before you could pick up badges; it's absolutely surreal that I can occasionally get away with writing "Jason Seaver, Jay's Movie Blog" on the sign-in sheet for one of these things. That's opening film Her Private Hell, which regular press passes don't get into anyway, and while I didn't see the director presented with an award as a result, that's fine (honestly, probably got the best). It means getting up stupidly early tomorrow will just be my habit of late rather than necessity.

Because that meant I could start the evening with Tunnels: Sun in the Dark, rather than catch the 10:45am show Friday, then head across the street for Kung Fu, crossing my fingers that Larry Fessenden would stay to host Friday's Trauma encore.

Which is where we have the plan for Friday: Trauma, or Monsters All, Dance Freak, Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant, and then Blaise, figuring Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma will be everywhere in a couple weeks. Tunnels is worth a look (if I post this in time).


Her Private Hell

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2026 in Cinema du Parc #2 (Fantasia press screening, DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

The opening shot of Her Private Hell is fantastic, the sort of thing the rest of the films in the festival will have a hard time topping, but also something that the rest of this film will have a hard time building on. Nicholas Winding Refn's movie is never less than visually striking, but as is often the case with the director, his storytelling is not up to his vibe creation.

Once he's set the scene, we meet Elle (Sophie Thatcher), a glamorous young movie star whose wealthy family lives in the penthouse apartment of the dizzying Tower Hotel. She spots Hunter (Kristine Froseth), one of her co-stars in the movie shooting the next day, sleeping in the lobby because her room was given away, and invites her up. There, she'll meet Elle's stepmother Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), another co-star who was once Elle's best friend, and Elle's father Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), who says he is leaving town during the shoot so Elle and Dominique can fix things between them. Before that, Elle and Hunter witness a neighbor murdered by the monstrous Leather Man, who is being hunted by revenge-seeking Soldier K (Charles Melton).

The look and feel of all this is impeccable, a vaguely futuristic city either distinct from K's reality- which is seemingly postwar Japan - or located hundreds of stories above it. The crystalline planet where Elle's retro sci-fi movie takes place blends into both and the mythic space which seems to spawn the Leather Man and a pair of mysterious young women. Refn's team designs and shoots the heck out of it and the music has a driving bass line, with the effect that this world which has been fragmented and abstracted in different ways holds together extremely well.

The same can't be said of the stories and characters, though. The movie gets by for a while on Elle's aloof cynicism clearly being at war with her still loving the people who have hurt her, but Refn's story is all over the place; Hunter doesn't really have a place in that, K is all over the place, and the folks who are introduced and shuffled off for narrative convenience just feel like so much filler. The places where there's a lot going on are too busy to be interesting, and the time in between are slogs. Refn can't quite balance telling the audience that the glamorous are shallow, petty people while relying on holding the audience's interest by playing on how fascinating they're supposed to be.

Sophie Thatcher almost can, though; Elle is full of melancholy and anger and just enough damning self-awareness to know that she's too privileged to garner much sympathy. Kristine Froseth is a fun contrast as Hunter, for a while; she wears nice clothes and makeup well but is not high-class in the way Elle and Dominique are and Refn eventually doesn't have anything to do with that conflict (there are a couple scenes that feel like terrible overacting before clicking as Hunter trying to be melodramatic in the same way Elle and Dominique are, when they do). Havana Rose Liu eventually has more to do but has little enough toward the start for it to be a problem. Charlie Melton plays his cipher well enough, but Diego Calva's Niko is clearly there so that the dynamics between the girls don't feel entirely like lesbian drama (and, to be fair, a lot of young actresses have done sex scenes to keep movies with three male leads from seeming too gay).

Refn is a good enough director and his cast and crew are talented enough that much of this is staged impeccably, with enough good bits that it is absolutely worth watching once. I'm genuinely curious what a second viewing will have me thinking, outside the minor caveat that the Japanese-language dialogue was subtitled in French rather than English (though my French was probably good enough to get the gist). It's entirely possible there will be layers I didn't spot the first time, but I'm afraid that it will appear more clearly as a pretty, hollow mess.


Dia Dao: Mat Troi Trong Bong Toi (Tunnels: Sun in the Dark)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2026 in Cinema J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

The first Vietnam War film that I've ever seen from Vietnam, Tunnels: Sun in the Dark is not exactly dry, but it can be rather procedural, a very clear take on how tunnel operations during the war worked that does not quite become the intense pressure cooker one might expect. Perhaps there is a sort of survivorship bias, in that you just wouldn't last in the tunnels and tell the tale unless you had a certain level of stoicism. Whatever the reason, Tunnels feels like an unusually muted sort of war movie, especially considering its domestic release was tied to the fiftieth anniversary of the war's end.

The action here takes place in 1967, starting with two noteworthy incidents in the ruins of the Binh An Dong hamlet of Cu Chi: First, Ba Huong (Thu Anh Ho) captures the lurking Tu Dap (Quang Tuan), a mechanic who claims their mothers were sworn sisters and a marriage had been arranged between them; second, local commander Bay Theo (Thai Hoa) welcomes Hai Thung (Hoang Minh Triet), whom he had previously been told would be guarding medical supplies but who in fact commands an intelligence operation that will be listening to American signals and relaying them, an operation that will bring increased attention and bombing to the tunnel system.

Western filmgoers have likely seen plenty of movies about the Vietnam War from the American perspective, and their structure and focus was often dictated by how Americans fought the war and many others: A focus on large operations getting mired down in an environment to which they are not well suited, a sort of incredulity that the most powerful fighting force the world had ever seen could get worn down and ultimately defeated by tactics that often seemed like madness. The flip side, it would seem, is the Vietnamese view of people hunkering down, literally inside their homeland, doing what they can to stop this invading juggernaut. This was never going to be a war of overwhelming victory in decisive battles, but persistence and digging in, laying claim to the land despite efforts to take it away.

What often takes center stage as a result is a story of community: The senior officers are uncles rather than generals, fretting about keeping secrets and managing the dynamics in their cells more than large-scale tactics. There are movie nights and singalongs that would play differently in the recent spate of Chinese movies about the Korean War, where the point would be reinforcing ideology rather than connections. Heck, there's a romance in there that feels genuine near the center.

It's not too cutesy, thankfully; especially compared to the other women in the tunnels, Thu Anh Ho's Ba Huong is not prone to nonsense or vanity. She gets most of the action-hero moments in the film, communicating the grim determination to do what's necessary without it having completely extinguished her humanity, and she seems enjoyably irritated that she's catching feelings for this guy who tried to use the possibility to manipulate his way into the unit. Quang Tuan's is a complement to her, a tinkerer who seems like he'd be a liability in the field but whose mind is unnervingly capable of designing weapons; there's a similar recklessness about Tu Dap's growing affection for his captor. Meanwhile, Thai Hoa is the steady bedrock of the film as Bay Theo, never off-mission but palpably concerned about the people in his charge, an uneasy contrast to Hoang Minh Triet's focused Hai Thung, who carries himself with the air of someone who knows how crucial their role is and won't let anyone suggest it's one notch less.

(That "especially compared to the other women" doesn't mean the other women in the film are stereotypes so much as they are young women clearly thrust into roles that would not be traditional and their performances reflect that it's not easy to simply turn deactivate who they were before signing up to fight and intend to be after the war.)

The film reflects the general level-headedness of the main characters; though the Cu Chi tunnel system is under constant attack by American forces over the course of the film, raised voices and panic are rare. Though quarters are tight and lighting is often appropriately dim, it's not exactly a claustrophobic sensation that emerges so much as one of known and understood limits. There are problems to solve and tension as the soldiers try to handle them, but the feeling is often akin to talking to veterans, "we had a job to do that couldn't be avoided, so we did it". The moments of actual fighting are often brief and pointed - without being lectures, they sharply highlight how trying to fight an opponent with firepower that's an order of magnitude greater is folly, or how monstrous American forces have become to try and use their resources against the Viet Cong - the bombing seems desperate, and the attempts to flood them out of their tunnels far more vicious and unsporting than the VC's guerilla warfare.

It's an unusual war film in that way, not the grinder one may expect from decades of American films but interesting nonetheless. It's fascinating how the different perspective doesn't just change the meaning of the film's commentary, but its structure and design.


Kung Fu '26

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

The introduction to Kung Fu at the festival implied that director Giddens Ko was adapting a comic book series he had written rather than a novel, which would track - there is a lot going on here, enough that Ko has to move at crazy speed to get it all in, and it often seems built around the visual rather than something that would work in print. It might work better as a television series than a movie, but I don't know that Taiwanese TV has the budget for the scale he wanted for the action. It's too much, really, but I don't know that it could have been otherwise.

It follows two high school friends, You Soo-Yuan (Kai Ko) and Chen Ming-Yi (Berant Zhu), who try to stay out of trouble but get bullied anyway, with Yuan nursing a crush on pretty but quick-tempered classmate Yi-Jing (Gingle Wang Ching) while Yi has a thing for her mother (Tseng Wan-Ting). A little kindness to what appears to be a mentally-ill vagrant at the bowling alley has the man, Huang Jun (Leon Dai) reveal himself as an ancient kung fu master, eager to take the boys on as disciples. They eventually accept, with Jing the first to realize something is very much off about them as they gain Chi power, but it's soon revealed that Huang Jun is not alone, with former friend Lan Jin (Liu Kuan-Ting) cutting a swath through the underworld, hoping to consolidate power and rule, and he seems a lot more capable and focused than Huang Jun. But things are not entirely as they seem!

Indeed, things are really not as they seem, with the sort of audacious twist at roughly the midway point more often seen in Indian films where the filmmakers can use the intermission to reset and restart with the surprisingly altered premise. It's a potentially great spin; the issue is that by that point things are moving so quickly that Ko has a hard time slowing things down enough to explore the implications or poke around the lore he's just introduced. There's really nothing to do but fight at this point, because things have already built to a fever pitch and there's not a lot of room for nuance or the kids finding new allies, even though what Ko has introduced deserves some time as a thriller before becoming a brawl.

The brawling is fun, though - Ko and action team Triple A are aiming for the sort of larger-than-life wire fu that gave Stephen Chow international hits in Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer (fingers crossed for Kung Fu Soccer in a few weeks!), though with some bloody splatstick mixed in. It's high-flying action that doesn't exactly have much interest in looking realistic, as the impossibility of it is in some ways the point of the whole thing, the focus more on how these guys have so much raw power that their bodies are running hot and wailing on each other is going to cause a lot of collateral damage, rather than the sort of impressive, precise movement that indicates years of training and mastery. Ko moves fast to be able to move from one fight to another without a lot of room to rest, and while he doesn't always succeed in balancing the broad comedy and the gruesome combat, it's kind of exhausting rather than frustrating, a constant stream of high energy rather than whiplash that would have a viewer upset that he replaced the thing one was enjoying with something else.

An amiable cast helps; Kai Ko plays Yuan as a sad-sack dork with a fair amount of resentment and anger underneath, and it's kind of an impressive balancing act: There's clearly something ready to be unleashed upon his frustrations and worse, but he never quite comes across as the sort of nasty incel that would be a bad boyfriend if Jing decided to look at him that way. Gingle Wang is a good match for him in that way; her Jing is brimming with hostility and there's a certain delight in seeing how learning Ultimate Kung Fu gives her a way to vent but also a way to have friends. Berant Zhu doesn't quite play a sidekick so much as the film's glue, a likable presence that keeps a lot of scenes going and jokes flowing.

It's Leon Dai who is billed first, though, and he's the one who gets a lot to do, a lot more than just "ancient magic warrior not coping entirely well with the present". Huang Jun is kind of nuts, and it manifests in several different ways, and yet all the various facets revealed by the plot twists and in flashbacks feel coherent even as they're scattered and contradictory. The movie is built in such a way that he's the sort of character you might expect to be sidelined toward the end so that the kids can step up, but this isn't that movie, and Dai handles the challenge adroitly even as the film requires him to be manic.

I must admit, Kung Fu is kind of an exhausting movie to see at the end of a long day, and the mix of broad comedy and cruel violence had me wishing it would pick a lane at times. I still might be interested in catching it again in other circumstances ,to see how it plays when I've got a little more room to breathe even if the film doesn't.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 10 July 2026 - 16 July 2026

Always the way of it - really scraping to find something to go to some days, then more than you can watch are on the schedule, but also, a thing theaters have been showing previews for is not coming out unless you want to spend twice as much time traveling to see it as watching it.

• Just a couple years after the original animated film (itself only ten years old) had a pretty successful sequel, Disney gives us a live-action Moana, with Dwayne Johnson returning as Maui but a mostly new cast otherwise. It's at the Capitol, Fresh Pond (including 3D), Jordan's Furniture (Imax 2D Friday-Sunday), West Newton, Boston Common (including Imax Laser 2D & Dolby Cinema 2D & RealD 3D), Causeway Street (including XL 2D & RealD 3D), Kendall Square, the Seaport, South Bay (including Imax Xenon 2D & Dolby Cinema 2D & RealD 3D), Assembly Row (including Imax Laser 2D & Dolby Cinema 2D & RealD 3D), Arsenal Yards (including CWX), and Chestnut Hill.
  
  With Evil Dead Burn, there are officially as many second-cycle Evil Dead movies there were in the original series, with Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert, and Bruce Campbell this time entrusting their baby to French filmmaker Sébastien Vanicek, whose Infested shows the right vibe for having the Necronomicon completely ruin a weekend with one's late husband's family. Honestly, it's kind of cool that they're using this thing identified with them to elevate up-and-comers like this. The movie opens at Fresh Pond, CinemaSalem, Boston Common (including XL & Dolby Cinema), Causeway Street, the Seaport, South Bay (including Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema), and Arsenal Yards.
  
  Also opening is Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, featuring Zoey Deutch as a small-town girl who feels she needs to even the scales when her fiancé has sex with his celebrity crush and so goes to Hollywood looking for John Hamm. It's the latest from the writing team of director David Wain and co-star Ken Marino, playing the Somerville, the Coolidge, Dedham Community Theatre, Boston Common, Kendall Square, and the Seaport.
  
  The Night Nurse opening at Boston Common, the Seaport is not the Barbara Stanwyck classic, but a thriller involving a retirement home caregiver who becomes enmeshed as it is targeted by phone scammers.
  
  IFFBoston Closing film The Invite adds the Somerville, West Newton, Dedham Community Theatre, Causeway Street, Kendall Square, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Chestnut Hill to the Coolidge and Boston Common.
  
  South Bay has matinees of The Lego Movie Monday & Wednesday.
• IFFBoston selection Rose of Nevada opens atThe Coolidge Corner Theatre; I was pretty fond of this shot-on-16mm oddity from the director of Enys Men about a crew (George MacKay, Callum Turner, Francis Magee) who sign on to work a fishing boat that drifts into port after vanishing years earlier and find themselves returning to the time it vanished, and apparently the lives of the original crew.
  
  Alien invasion midnights this weekend are Fire in the Sky on 35mm film Friday and Invasion of the Saucer Men Saturday. The Slamdance Film Festival presents a selection of this year's films: Brailled It and Danny Is My Boyfriend on Sunday. There's also a July series celebrating Marylin Monroe's centennial, with Some Like It Hot Sunday afternoon. Other Special Screenings include documentary Ask E. Jean with director Ivy Meeropol on hand Monday; A Big Screen Classic presentation of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance on Monday; the conclusion of "Spielberg X Nolan" with Minority Report on 35mm film Tuesday and Tenet on 70mm Wednesday; and the 70mm print of The Odyssey arriving Thursday.
• South Asian movies at Apple Fresh Pond and elsewhere include Lenin (also at Boston Common), a Tamil-language film apparently starring Akhil Akkineni as the Russian revolutionary; Tamil-language coming-of-age comedy Idhayam Murali; Hindi-language comedy Dhamaal 4, the latest in a series about treasure-hunting con artists; and Malayalam-language crime movie I, Nobody. Hind-language action/adventure Alpha continues at Boston Common.
  
  Chinese war movie Crossing features Liu Ye as Mao Zedong with Andrew Lau Wai-Keung directing the story of Mao's four crossings of the Chishui River. It opens at Boston Common, Causeway Street.
  
  Korean thriller The Eyes (a remake of Spanish-language film Julia's Eyes) follows a woman losing her sight trying who discovers her blind sister hung in their basement and seeks to prove it was a murder despite the police being convinced it's a suicide. It plays Boston Common.
  
  The Studio Ghibli film at the 'plexes this weekend is My Neighbor Totoro, playing Assembly Row, Boston Common on Saturday/Sunday/Wednesday (dubbed) and Monday/Tuesday (subtitled).
• After The Brattle Theatre starts the weekend with a 35mm print of Michael Caine in the original 1966 Alfie for the Friday film matinee, before paying tribute to Bow-Sim Mark, a martial arts master who started her Boston academy 50 years ago, by playing three films starring her son Donnie Yen: Drunken Tai Chi on 35mm film Friday evening and Saat Po Lang (aka Kill Zone) on Saturday, with John Wick: Chapter 4 as the second half of the double feature both nights. The weekend also features several Chinese films presented by STArt Film Studios - Living the Land and As the Water Flows on Saturday and Fly Me to the Moon on Sunday, all with pre-recorded introductions and Q&As.
  
  On Sunday, they start The Stanton Rule: A Harry Dean Stanton Centennial with a double feature of Cool Hand Luke & Ride in the Whirlwind, following that up with Repo Man on 35mm Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday, Cisco Pike on 35mm Tuesday, UFOria Wednesday (35mm double feature with Repo Man), and Lucky on Thursday. There's also an open-crafting show of La La Land on Monday evening and the latest selection of local GRRL HAUS CINEMA shorts on Thursday.
• The Capitol Theatre has Bubsy Berkley's Take Me Out to the Ball Game, starring Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Esther Williams, for "Play Ball!" on Friday.
  
  The Somerville Theatre seems to be squeezing a little extra rep in before The Odyssey's 70mm print settles down in the main screen on Thursday: Alien 3 plays in 35mm Friday night, while Saturday closes out Kurt & Jodie with The Hateful Eight on 70mm & Carnage on 35mm, before Frankenhooker plays to complement f GASH's Villains Ball up in the Crystal Ballroom, and then Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 35mm for the midnight special! Documentary Italian Wannabe is listed for Monday.
• The Museum of Fine Arts has The Christophers for an "Art on Fim" show on Friday evening.
• The Seaport Alamo has John Boorman's Excalibur Monday & Tuesday, a Jurassic Park movie party Monday, The Faculty on Tuesday, Baahubali: The Epic, Carlito's Way, and BUFF selection Buffet Infinity (with short "Man Eating Pussy") on Wednesday. Separate admission on those three, though it'd be a heck of a day at the movies if it lined up better.
• Landmark Kendall Square has E.T. on Tuesday for the Big Screen/Amblin summer movie and Batman Begins on Wednesday for Christopher Nolan Wednesdays (inspired by the Coolidge? Who can say, it's not a hard to series to come up with!).
• There's a pretty full slate of outdoor screenings this week, with Joe's Free Films and others showing Fantastic Mr. Fox at the MIT Open Space and Hamilton at the Hatch Shell on Friday; How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days at TimeOut Market on Monday; Babe at the Somerville Library on Tuesday; Speed at the Allston Speedway on Wednesday; and School of Rock at Lincoln Park in Somerville on Thursday.
• Supergirl plays its last shows on the Omni screen at The Museum of Science on Friday & Saturday, with The Odyssey opening next week. There's also a special screening of documentary #SheBelongs on Thursday, and the animated How to Train Your Dragon gets a free show on the 25th as part of Disability Pride month.
• The Lexington Venue is open all week but Mpnday with Blue Heron (which played the Coolidge a couple months back), Tuner, and Minions & Monsters. Documentary Lightworkers has a free screening on Wednesday and the "Just a Minute" Short Festival plays for free on Thursday.
  
  The West Newton Cinema opens Moana and The Invite, holding over Time and Water, Minions & Monsters, Toy Story 5, Disclosure Day, Pressure, and The Sheep Detectives. There's a sing-along show of Grease on Sunday.
  
  The Dedham Community Theatre has Gail Daughtry, The Invite, and Tuner this week.
  
  Cinema Salem plays Evil Dead Burn, Leviticus, Minions & Monsters, and Toy Story 5 from Friday to Monday. The Friday Night Light Show is Tank Girl; Some Like It Hot plays with a post-film chat on Saturday. The Wednesday Classic is Gone with the Wind, with Weirdo Wednesday next door, and on Thursday they have Four Letters of Love, the opening night selection of the Salem Irish Film Festival.
  
  The Isolate Thief plays out at the Liberty Tree Mall in Davers, with Mackenzie Foy manning a Civil War-era outpost and having to outwit gold-seeking outlaws led by Sean Bean; Odeya Rush and Joe Pantoliano are also in the cast.

So, huh, there should be time to get from The Hateful Eight to Saat Po Lang on Saturday, even with introductions and intermissions, but do I want to chance it? Anyway, still want to check out both the Donnie Yens, Evil Dead Burn, Minority Report, The Eyes, and Toy Story 5; probably won't be able to squeeze Crossing in before heading to Montreal for Fantasia on Wednesday. That, of course, will keep my Letterboxd page busy!

Alpha '26

Man, 3.1/10 on IDMB for this? That's, like, *¼ on the four-star scale, And while I know I'm perhaps overly reluctant to get below two stars unless there's either something so shoddy that it looks amateurish about a movie or it's entirely wrong-headed (on top of just skipping that which looks unappealing), that seems pretty harsh for a movie that's loud and dumb but not actually inept.

It's kind of funny, for all that you hear a lot of discourse about how American fandom often has no distance between "sux!" and "rools!", just looking at the ratings on foreign films (especially East or South Asian) from their native audiences often reveals trends that seem even more extreme, although often more eloquently stated, just a lot of star rankings pegged at either end. If the aggregate winds up in the middle, it's because that's the average, not the median or mode.

That seems kind of harsh in this case; it's a messy but not painful movie. Still, it's kind of nice to see that it's not just us sometimes, even if that includes "slagging on the female-led entries in a series much more than they deserve."


Alpha '26

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2026 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

Has the YRF Spy Universe been experiencing diminishing returns since it officially became a thing with Pathaan, the way American cinematic universes have since the pandemic? There's no mid-credit scene at the end of Alpha to indicate that the next entry is already in the works, the inevitable crossover scene is a bit less intrusive than usual, and the whole thing is slightly less slick, like Yash Raj Films is a bit less all-in on the whole project. It's not bad, but if the franchise does sputter out, folks will probably see this as where it started.

It opens in 1999, the day after the Kagal War with Pakistan, with future RAW chief Vikrant Kaul (Anil Kapoor) and comrade Fateh Singh Lakhawat (Bobby Deol) the only survivors of their unit, with Fateh spearheading the Alpha super-soldier project. Alpha serum proves fatal, not just to soldiers, but to Kaul's wife Janaki (Dia Mizra), to whom he'd administered it so she could survive a difficult pregnancy. She dies in childbirth, and Kaul believes his daughter has too, but Fateh has kidnapped the child and raised her to be an assassin, Sita (Alia Bhatt). In 2026, she snaps, killing everyone involved with Project Alpha, intending to save Fateh and Kaul for last - but what neither she nor Fateh realizes is that she has a twin, Durga (Sharvari), who Vikrant's brother has been raising in Spain and who also has Alpha serum flowing in her veins, though.

There's a fair amount of gas in here, especially the first half, which doesn't exactly take forever to get to adult Sita but does have enough steps along the way that you can feel the convolutions and wish for the filmmakers to just get on with (although, to their credit, things do move quickly enough that I didn't wonder about the obstetrician who apparently believed Sita was stillborn but alert enough to spirit Durga away until after the movie). Enough goes on that things never get truly drab, but it's carefully constructed enough that when the movie hits the interval, the inevitable redirection feels less like a twist than the movie finally becoming the picture it was always going to be.

Director Shiv Rawail and a brace of writers eventually get things moving through action, which is pretty decent, for the most part; Alia Bhatt especially seems fairly athletic and willing to throw herself around and mix it up with bigger opponents, and her clean moves are a neat contrast with Sharvari, whose Durga is fit and enhanced but has clearly used her gifts for skateboarding and soccer more than fighting while Sita has been honed into a weapon. A lot of the action is sort of typical of big Indian movies, for better or worse - Rawail and the action team use a lot of speed-changes, quick pans, and wire-fu to make a fight feel like one long move, although savvy action fans recognize the tricks by now. It's still often fun mayhem; the big fight immediately after the interval is a blend of clockwork antics and automatic weapons that feels like gleeful, unembarrassed spy-fi and while sometimes the action isn't as clear as it could be, there's glee in big explosions without being completely sadistic.

The cast, by and large, seems to understand the job of trying to entertain the audience. Bhatt, who most Western viewers will probably know best from RRR, in particular is kind of a weird delight as a wry, hard-edged antihero, the sort of cocky and eccentric badass that guys get to play in Indian action pics a lot more than women; Sharvari plays a romantic comedy character who just happens to have superpowers and it's a bit of a shame the filmmakers couldn't build more comedy out of Durga rubbing off on Sita than just having the former toughen up as the movie goes on. Anil Kapoor is thoroughly reliable as Vikrat (though, admittedly, I'm a sucker for the silver-templed pencil pusher getting to actually prove cool), while Bobby Deol gets the part that seems kind of dumb and one-note until the film stops trying to be mysterious or ambiguous and takes the chains off to let him go nuts as a villain.

The Alia Bhatt/Sharvari sister act is potentially the most entertaining part of Alpha, and I'm kind of glad that the filmmakers got right to it rather than using it as the hook for Beta or some other sequel that may never come. Mostly, it's a familiar big-budget action flick that clicks a lot of boxes - plenty of action, mid-movie twist, two dance numbers, a digital look that starts to look a little too fake when there's a lot going on, and a sudden shift from a sort of nebulous enemy to clear nationalism - and makes the wise decision to start breaking things whenever it gets a bit too slow. It's kind of middle-of-the-pack, as far as these Spy Universe movies go, but it's not out of the question I'll look back on it fondly if Sita and/or Durga show up in another one.

I Know Who You Are

So, is there anything coming out next weekend where the politics might be dodgy, especially considering where it comes from? Because that's kind of been Sundays for the past few weeks, and it's starting to get weird.

I'm actually surprised, looking at the Chinese box office, that this looks like it's kind of a moderate success in its native country; just looking at the description, it looks like it might be the sort of thing that might be a big hit because folks are "encouraged" to watch it. But maybe not; like Unidentified a couple weeks ago, it might be more like a movie set against this background than one pushing it. The last two huge hits in China appear to be a couple May Day releases, drama Dear You and thriller Vanishing Point, which didn't play Boston even though it apparently did get an American release.

Anyway, it's genuinely weird that China Lion decided to open the movie about cops spying on their neighbors Fourth of July weekend.


Zhua Te Wu (aka I Know What you Are)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2026 in AMC Causeway Street #7 (first-run, laser DCP)

I Know What You Are feels like the kind of movie you make after your authoritarian government that pits its citizens against each other falls or reforms, and maybe China has, at least compared to the period depicted, but not enough: The censorship/propaganda ministries still have enough influence on the film industry there that the filmmakers can only really poke around the themes that might make this movie really interesting.

It starts in 1949, just after "Liberation", as the Republic of China forces retreat to Taiwan, with spymaster Yan Diankun (Yu Hewei) installing agent 5182, schoolteacher Feng Jingbo (Hu Ge), in an apartment and instructions to listen to a shortwave radio, although he soon attracts the attention of policeman Xiao Dali (Lei Jiayin) as another spy escapes. Xiao installs his family in the same apartment complex as Feng - wife Liu Yaqin (Chuai Ni) teaches at the same school - but Feng seems to anticipate his moves, marrying former brother maid Da Meizi (Zhang Yao), and as their families grow closer over the next 40 years, Feng loses contact with his handlers and integrates himself into the community, even as Xiao's continued obsession makes him look paranoid.

Sort of by necessity, Feng never seems to be a terribly committed spy, even from the beginning; though his recruiter mentions "three principles" as a justification for the Nationalist cause, but there's never much sign that Feng believes in them and why, which means that the latter half of the movie can't do much to raise the question of whether he has become a true believer in the People's Republic or if he's just learned how to quote Mao and the new Constitution as camouflage. There's potential drama and tragedy in the idea that Feng has reformed but Xiao (and the state) cannot let the pursuit go, or that Feng is committed to his cause but ultimately abandoned, but if he's going to be anything but a pure villain in a Chinese film, his actual work for the Nationalists is going to have to be abstract and minimal.

This doesn't stop writer Shi Jianquan (working from a Zhang Ce novel) and director Feng Xiaogang from getting something from the scenarios; there are some nifty bits as Jingbo is actually trying to perform his mission and Dali attempts to catch him early on - not exactly complex spycraft, but the seemingly low stakes add a spark of comic absurdity - and the time-jumping, generational nature of the narrative makes the latter acts especially poignant, as Dali's grown son Xinwei (Lin Xioafan) and Jingbo's daughter Kangmei (Yang Shuyi) are practically already family aside from being in love and their fathers' opposition is the only thing keeping them apart.

It's clumsy getting from one state to another, though. Meizi's evolution as a character feels like the filmmakers need her to suddenly be much more perceptive and mature at a certain point (or much less so toward the start), and while that can come from marriage and motherhood, it's clearly a character that needed to fill two different roles at different times and minimal effort was put into reconciling them. Because of the time jumps, a lot necessarily happens off-screen, but some of them feel pivotal enough and close enough to what is shown that the film would really benefit from showing them, while others are oddly ambiguous - near the end, Xinwei and Kangmei suddenly go from the heart of the film to maybe or maybe not being married offscreen despite their fathers' forbidding their relationship, and the final flash-forward feels like it could be talking about either them or their kids being a couple!

The performances wind up being roughly as good as the script will allow - with so much jumping forward in time and trying to keep the situation static, Lei Jiayin often kinds up looking kind of inept even as the film ultimately wants to portray him as loyal and doggedly determined, while Hu Ge seems to play Feng's attempts to present fealty to the PRC as clumsy and superficial (indeed, he's kind of at his best trapped in a loveless marriage early on, and I feel like there's a good movie to be made about this pairing of an intellectual and a worker just not working despite how they claim to aspire to a classless society). The supporting cast has more room to move Chuai Ni is sneaky-great as Dali's wife, often presenting as kind of oblivious to his investigation of Jingbo but a big-hearted force of nature in handling the families, and while Zhang Yao never quite marries Meizi's ignorance at the start to her fierce pragmatism later, her dramatic moments outweigh her early comedy. Lin Xiaofan and especially Yang Shuyi give the audience a lot to hold onto as likable, seemingly normal people hurt by their parents' pasts.

Feng Xiaogang's early films, especially, had a keen satiric edge beneath their absurdity, and the film is at its best when he has a chance to bring that out. When he's going hard at making state security look like neighborhood busybodies, pointing out all the mismatches that Mao's ideology has disastrously engineered or how shutting down the brothels forced many women out of a comfortable life, showing how much more vibrant the town became when a little free enterprise was allowed, and the final irony about how this thing that ruined two families' lives was basically forgotten by those who set it in motion, that's when you can see a potentially great movie, especially as the neighborhood evolves as time passes while retaining its basic character.

But, for whatever reason, he doesn't make that movie; he makes one where the characters' actual beliefs are never important even though it's supposedly driving a conflict that lasts decades and the harm done can never be acknowledged except as necessary for the greater good, and how can you walk out with a lump in your throat unless you're already sold on the whole thing?