Prisoners of the Ghostland was one of the most anticipated films at Fantasia 2021. It unites madcap director Sion Sono (last seen at Fantasia with the feature version of Tokyo Vampire Hotel) with a certain mister Nicolas Cage. You might reasonably expect a full-throttle over-the-top ride. And that doesn’t quite happen. Written by Aaron Hendry and Reza Sixo Safai, the movie takes place in a part of the world scarred by a spill of nuclear waste. A village called Samurai…

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“Cuckoo!” is a 7-minute short film from the Netherlands directed by Jörgen Scholtens, who co-wrote with Jörgen Van Weeren. It’s a surreal piece about a tiny man (Frank Lammers) who lives in a cuckoo clock with his even tinier cat. He’s responsible for popping out on the hour, but one day things go wrong and lead to a cascade failure. It’s an absurd piece about routine, and it has a good production design involving old technologies. It’s a bittersweet story…

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Satoshi Kon was one of the great geniuses of anime. Born in 1963, in his twenties he worked briefly in manga, then became an assistant to Katsuhiro Otomo, scripting a segment in the anthology film Memories. The first movie of his own was Perfect Blue, in 1997, a suspense story about an actress pursued by a stalker. It blurs the line between real and unreal, which would become a hallmark of Kon’s later work — as with his next film,…

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Midnight (미드나이트, Mi-deu-nai-teu) is a suspense thriller from Korea that revolves around Kyung-mi (Ki-joo Jin), a young deaf woman who, one night on her way to meet her mother (Hae-yeon Kil), comes across a grievously wounded woman named So-jung (Kim Hye-Yoon). So-jung’s been attacked by a maniacal serial killer, Do-sik (Wi Ha-Joon, Squid Game), who now sees Kyung-mi and selects her as his next victim. Meanwhile, So-jung’s frantic brother (Park Hoon) is desperately trying to find his sister. Whether he’ll…

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I’ve generally been reviewing one movie a day as I work through my experience of the 2021 Fantasia Film Festival, but today I’m doing something a little different. One of the movies available on-demand this year was a reworked version of Junk Head, which I reviewed when it played Fantasia in 2017. Another movie at this year’s festival was Mad God, the brainchild of veteran special-effects man Phil Tippett (who worked on the original Star Wars trilogy, Indiana Jones and…

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“Prophet” was written and directed by Reza Gamini; it’s an 18-minute horror short about the survivors of an attack from creatures drawn by sound. The monsters return periodically, killing people at the slightest noise. Which becomes a problem for babies and the parents of babies. This is a dark story about people responding to a brutal situation — refugees gathering on a beach, fearing the next attack, where previous waves of refugees have set up some social structures with basic…

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“She and the Darkness” (“Ella y la Oscuridad”) is a 13-minute Spanish film from director Daniel Romero, who co-wrote it with Rubin Stein. A janitor (Beatriz Arjona) suffering from extreme depression sees something unexpected during a stress-driven walk one night, a girl who should not be alive. Which discovery leads her into some strange and violent situations. This is another short that’s heavy on atmosphere and shadows, but has minimal dialogue. Often, as here, the attempt to tell a story…

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“Ghost Dogs” is an animated short film from Joe Cappa, who directed and co-wrote the script with J.W. Hallford. It’s a fine 11-minute piece about a dog exploring his new home and finding more than he understands. There’s no dialogue, being entirely from the perspective of the dog wandering about the not-quite empty house, and the movie gets some fine effects by having him uncover things that mean nothing to him but tell human viewers quite a bit. The 2D…

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“The Horse Guessing Game” is a 9-minute short by Xia Leilei. It’s a beautiful piece of work made of stop-motion paper dolls and shadowplay, mostly black-and-white, with colour used briefly and well to heighten the significance of one sequence. I can’t claim to understand it entirely, but it opens with a woman or girl isolated from those around her, and appears to show her entering into a shadow-world with great potential and great danger where she might gain a voice…

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One Second Champion is a feature film from Hong Kong directed by Sin Hang Chiu and written by Ashley Cheung, Siu Hong Ho, Ho Tin Li, and Wai Chun Ling. Chow (Endy Chow) was born brain dead for one second, and somehow this gave him the power to see one second into the future — but only one second. As a kid he had a brief period of fame for his oddball talent, but he was never able to find…

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