When we talk about nature today, it’s often loaded with visions of some bygone, unspoiled era where plants and animals lived in interwoven harmony. What follows is the palpitating guilt of human nature and how humanity has extracted so much from the natural world that we are now hurtling towards cataclysm. To an extent, both […]
Do you ever get roped into a film with certain expectations about what you’re going to see… only to be met with something completely different? I would safely file Japanese director Shinzo Katayama’s Missing under that niche marketing category. At first glance, it’s a film that promises a paint-by-numbers revenge thriller given its fairly generic […]
Right at the beginning of South Korean director Syeyoung Park’s The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra, a young woman tells her narcoleptic boyfriend about a shocking discovery she made in a nearby river. She and her team, she recalls, found an unusually high number of dead “dolphins” there, which bewildered the group. But when they conducted further […]
Every year, Montreal’s Fantasia Fest boasts an incredible lineup of genre films, ranging from horror films, thrillers, and the downright weird. But perhaps moreso than it is a genre-fest, Fantasia does a great job of bringing lesser-known, cult films from Asia and finds an audience for them here in North America. In preparation for the […]