Fantasia International Film Festival — A–Z of films

Putting Covid-19 in a monster movie context is psychologically significant: it gives us the power to imagine its defeat.

Reece is very much an actors’ director and he draws out splendid performances from his cast.

Nothing is taken too seriously - there's plenty of teasing within the group itself - but respect is shown for the effort that has gone into all this.

Beautiful to look at, as well as anarchic and contemporary.

Full of rough edges and unexpected moments, Baby, Don’t Cry! captures life in the raw.

A crime thriller whose lead characters are influenced by crime thrillers, caught up in a fantasy which repeatedly smacks up hard against the real world.

Cummings and McCabe want to have it all - and go a fairly long way towards getting it.

High concept films like this can easily go awry, but Makoto Ueda’s script somehow manages to stay on the ball throughout.

This is a decent little thriller which benefits from very strong design.

The film is pretty hit and miss.

Timely in its exploration of how we determine what’s real and how easy it is for what seems like legitimate research to become unbalanced and lead to strange places.

It’s astonishing to realise that this is Reis’ first screen role.

Coming Home In The Dark takes us to familiar places and renders them strange.

Its Jurassic Park style themes concerning failed Utopias passed through the prism of Sixties politics and activism have a certain childlike simplicity to them and, as such, are likely to prove more endearing to some audiences than others.

It’s not a straightforward attempt to track down the spy. Lenay is more interested in exploring the question from a phenomenological point of view.

Directed by Masashi Ando, this is absolutely gorgeous... For all its beauty though, it labours.

Director Rueben Martell also makes great use of the snowy forest setting.

This is one film about pursuing a dream that might actually be useful to people thinking of doing so themselves.

The way that director Lee Haven Jones frames male and female characters is intriguing, with classic gendered shots reversed.

A sweet tale which explores the precariousness of late childhood, as young people take on more responsibility for the world around them and come to carry more secret pain.

Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko has a unique charm.

Bursting with creative energy.

Concerns around privacy, bodily autonomy and the intrusion of the State into private life loom large in this all too viable dystopian tale.

Stefania Tortorella makes a delightful heroine, with Gloria switching overnight from sweet but downtrodden store assistant to a woman with the kind of glow that makes everybody want to be near her.

Beneath the kitsch visual language of 1950s advertising, a sharp intelligence is at work

One of the most tightly plotted and sharply observed pieces of science fiction to grace our screens for some years.

Mostly played out as a two-hander, this is a film which combines ambitious world-building with an intimacy and specificity that draw the viewer in.

A charming film which will appeal to viewers of all ages.

Taute favours real stunts over CGI and puts his team through their paces with some serious challenges, adding a certain frisson to the film which just doesn’t exist when only pixels are at stake.

An evocative, atmospheric film which packs a lot into its short runtime.

Production designer Eri Sakushima and costume designer Atsuko Shiraishi have done a magnificent job of bringing the manga's striking imagery to life.

Hamabe is impressive in a role which is more challenging this time around because most viewers will already know what Yumeko is capable of.

There’s a huge amount of ambition in Renata Pinheiro’s film.

If this hits the spot for you, you’ll probably be in stitches throughout, caught in a repetitive cycle of laughter – but if it doesn’t, you’ll be a bit lost.

It disappoints a bit on the monster front and it’s extremely uneven, with a dose of political satire that’s too broad for most adults and will bore most kids, but when it hits the mark, younger viewers will love it.

Edoardo Vitaletti packs his frames with detail, even when the decoration is relatively sparse.

A sort of freefall trip through both the director’s subconscious and the Cambodian underbelly.

Not only are there goldfish emblems absolutely everywhere, but the lives of fish and humans sometimes blur.

At first glance, one can feel the enormous amount of work, heart and effort put into the completion of this epic animation.

A brief slice of life delivered through wonderful, fresh performances.

An exquisitely crafted piece of work.

The chemistry is there in the performances, enabling us to translate the physics.

It’s shock comedy with no sense of impact or context, because before you can let the shock set in, the movie is running full steam ahead toward another disgusting episode.

Ambiguity lurks in the shadows and there's a doubling up and a doubling down.

Kazuaki Seki’s playful satire sticks closely to comic book form.

Weirdly, this spectacular mess of a film delivers, for those patient enough to get to them, a few moments of brilliance.

One of the cleverest and most entertaining comedies of the year.

With a focus throughout on Poly's achievements as a writer, the film makes room for her to speak for herself as much as possible: to be heard, not just seen.

The landscape within which all this takes place is spectacular: a richly imagined, fully fledged fantasy world.

Despite the whole thing being incredibly messy, it's eye-gogglingly enjoyable at the same time.

A great vocal performance by Daniel Amerman – sans words but full of emotion – combines with deftly rendered animation to give the humble cup lots of personality.

Holding it all together is a heartbreaking performance by Barbieri.

Scott McClellan’s gorgeous black and white photography picks out every detail of the actors’ faces yet masks them in shadow at crucial moments, allowing truths to emerge only slowly.

The sheer quantity of imitable violence in the film is likely to frighten censors around the world.

The central problem here is a common one in fantasy epics: it does go on a bit.

Its various elements gradually fit together to create something which is unsettling in all the right ways, yet somehow sweet at the same time.

Although The Story Of Southern Islet undoubtedly attracts with its remarkable aesthetics, especially beautiful slow shots, emphasising the magical, mysterious atmosphere, it is an hermetic film.

Simple tricks like painting sets pink and amassing large piles of low cost everyday objects enable the filmmakers to create a distinctive fantasy landscape on a very low budget.

I didn't hate it, but if I wanted to watch more than two hours of the undeniably weird doing the inexplicable, The Sparks Brothers is also in cinemas.

If you're a fan of Three Stooges-style silent slapstick but wish it came with a lot more gore, then, Sweetie, you won't believe what a treat you are in for

It's tightly structured but ambitious in scope and often reminiscent of Soviet cinema in both style and thematic arc.

Though aspects of its story stretch credulity even within the bounds of fantasy and it is at times spectacularly silly, it is delivered with rare style and panache.

Ultrasound is a slippery little puzzle of a film. It's cleverly put together and really quite neatly tied together, though not every viewer will successfully unravel it or, for that matter, make it to the end.

Such a handsomely shot, gloriously stylised piece of work that it can stand alongside the best of the genre proper.

One of the most strikingly original Japanese horror movies of its era.

Hong Eui-jeong directs with such assurance and such flair that it's hard to believe this is her first feature.

This film is long overdue.

What Josiah Saw simmers throughout, always potent, always dangerous.

Blackshear pulls off quite a trick by giving us the impression that things are as bad as they can get and then delivering something still more devastating.

Underscoring this film are potent themes about masculinity, identity and self-expression. There is also a fair bit of action, and not just of the mountain adventure variety.

Rather than trying to establish a thesis of her own, Janisse allows her interviewees to deliver contradictory viewpoints on key issues, and the film is richer for it.

The action is nicely choreographed and despite the lengthy running time most of the film is nicely paced, with a number of genre in-jokes to help it hold viewer attention.

It does its subjects the courtesy of letting them speak for themselves, but this often the equivalent of handing them enough rope.