Screen Anarchy

Marche du Film is a great time to be a genre fan because not only is the market full of productions looking for international sales but our friends at festivals and co-pros around the world gather en masse to drum up interest in future projects as well.    Our friends at Sitges announced the lineup for their Fantastic 7 program this year. Spanning the breadth of sub genres there will be a little bit of everything, from everywhere. The complete lineup of projects is in the gallery below with good synopses for each one.    1, 2, 3, 4… up to 7 titles, each selected by a major film festival, will make up the 8th edition of Fantastic 7.   The number 7 will once…

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Plus: ‘No Other Choice,’ ‘Marty Supreme,’ and ‘Dolly.’

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Plus: ‘Mother Mary,’ ‘Two Women,’ ‘Two Seasons, Two Strangers,’ ‘Buffet Infinity,’ ‘Mistura.’

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Plus: Mythical dreams in ‘My Brother the Minotaur.’

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What went wrong here, exactly? Normally, this column is a celebration of novel, or exceptionally designed key art from around the world. Today, however we shall take a look at one of the worst posters of the year, one that sits somewhere in the Uncanny Valley, coupled with a kind of generic laziness.  This hurts a bit, because I quite liked Olivier Assayas’s peek into the Soviet collapse of the 1990s, and the evolution of the Ruskiy Mir with the rise of industry Oligarchs and Vladimir Putin to reinvent the state TV as a more media-savvy entity charged to whip the population into a frenzy of hate. I loved Paul Dano and Jude Law’s performances, as the political artist and the aspiring dictator, in The…

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It seems strange to be writing a review for a film that is over 20 years old, about another film that few have seen.   Given its rogue construction, and unorthodox structure and style, Claire’s Hat has been screened publicly fewer than five times in the 24 years since its completion. The agreement with Hungarian-Canadian mega-producer of the film, and Toronto big-wig, Robert Lantos (ExistenZ, Being Julia, Johnny Mnemonic, The Sweet Hereafter, and of course, Picture Claire) is that director Bruce McDonald has to not only ask permission every time to show it, but also be present in the room during any screening.   I remember being at the Toronto International Film Festival premiere of McDonald’s Canadian caper film, Picture Claire, back in the day…

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Two teenage boys must escape a violent entity that takes the form of the person they desire most – each other.

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A strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom.

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A brave girl and her friends must escape a kids television show.

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Simon Glassman’s Buffet Infinity is one of those movies that defies categorization and can’t be easily pigeonholed.   Technically, it’s a found-footage movie; but it’s also, in a way, a screenlife movie. But then again, it’s gloriously retro and ignores modern technology altogether. That’s when writing about it becomes a challenge, even for seasoned film writers who think they’ve seen it all – until something like this comes along.   Buffer Infinity is a horror movie. It’s about a small town being swallowed up by some sort of otherwordly cult. It’s a tale of cosmic horror, and it’s told entirely through fictional news clips and cheap commercials, the kind you might see on public access or regional affiliates, especially during the 80s and 90s.  …

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