Screen Anarchy

Derek is down on his luck. Separated from his wife and child he lives out of his car, using it for ride-sharing to make ends meet. He meets an old friend, Gilbert, who offers to give him a job testing out the latest product from his high-tech start up. That product is Susan, a high end BDSM sex doll, designed to take as much punishment as her partners desire. She is as real as a sex-robot can be. Derek marvels at how life-like Susan is. So much so, that he tries to engage with her beyond sexual acts. But Susan is programmed for one thing and one thing only, bring sexual satisfaction to her partner, through any means necessary. And Susan is programmed to bring…

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Tamara searches for her missing son in a violent town, falling under the weight of a civil uprising. She comes across a morally questionable ex-detective Brajyuk, who, in a last ditch effort to stay alive, agrees to help her find him. His methods are cruel but she is determined to find her son whatever the cost. He discovers that their quests will meet along the same path so he more or less puts up with her trauma induced, stuttering gibberish as they race to the border to rescue her son.    Our first introduction to the works of Adilkhan Yerzhanov were his two films A Dark, Dark Man and Atbai’s Fight. Crime thrillers at their core, we would have compared them to the yakuza thrillers…

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It’s tough out there for a single gal. Alex (Blu Hunt) is a woman caught in the throes of malaise, accompanied by a desperate wish to find something worth caring about. Her daily grind is uninspiring, her home life with her sister is fraught, and dating? An absolute nightmare. She spends night after night swiping though Friktion (a hookup app) looking for her next fling. She swipes, they meet, they screw, they leave. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s a stultifying pattern to which she seems resigned, that is until she stumbles across Kyle (Ben Smith-Petersen). A lively, handsome guy who can actually carry a conversation and is interested in more than just a few furtive minutes of humping, Kyle seems like a dream. However, when he…

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CW: Domestic abuse, realistic violence Exploitation icon Scooter McCrae is back behind the camera with Black Eyed Susan, his first feature film since 1999’s Sixteen Tongues. After having directed a few shorts and doing a bit of acting in the intervening years, McCrae’s latest shows that he hasn’t lost his taste for challenging cinema with a film that is sure to start some very lively conversation. Premiering tonight at Fantasia 2024, Black Eyed Susan is the story Derek (Damian Maffei) and an advanced AI sex doll, called Susan, played by newcomer Yvonne Emilie Thälker. A machine designed specifically to take abuse, Derek is hired to put Susan to the test, leading to not only some pretty brutal and very unsettling violence, but also a lot…

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Lantern Blade is a web-seires directed by Zhu Ziqi at Mote Stop Motion Animation studio in China. Lantern Blade is part of the Tencent Video Original Animation Short Film Collection, an anthology with a stop-mo program. It was released in China this Summer on the Tencent platform. It is based on a Chinese manhua (comic book or manga) by the same name from author Gui Qi.    Two factions are headed towards the same goal, to stop the resurrection of the Witch Mother. There is the bride dragging a man behind her. She is the last surviving member of her clan. He is the lantern swordsman, whom she is hoping can bring an end to any further suffering. On the hilt of his sword is…

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The 24th edition of the Trieste Science+Fiction Festival gets a gorgeous illustration and design from Italian cartoonist Zerocalcare. Parasols, lanterns, and a jackhammer frame the characters from vastly different walks of life as twin moons fade off into the distance.  As Zerocalcare explains: “The poster tells the story of the distance between how I imagined science fiction as a kid and how my expectations have evolved: we used to think that in the future machines would do the alienating and exhausting jobs, leaving humans free to dedicate themselves to the arts. Today, quite the opposite, the evolution of artificial intelligence shows us a possible dystopia in which machines replace us in drawing and writing, while people continue to wake up in the morning to go…

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The award winning Sci fi-Action short film, Night Fishing, from Byoung-gon Moon played to an appreciative crowd before the other night’s screening of The Roundup: Punishment. Moon takes home the award for Best Editing at this year’s festival and we got to see why.    Starring the Hyundai Ioniq 5 (it is credited as a character) the short only uses footage captured by cameras on the car. All the angles are covered to provide a complete, 360 degree horizontal field of view. It was up to Moon and their team to cut that footage together and give us a truly entertaining few minutes of a fishing trip but for something not of this world.    The short opens at night with a view of a campsite…

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The winner of this year’s Sundance Audience Award is hitting theaters and, just as the name of the prize suggests, it’s bound to be a major delight for viewers. Rich Peppiatt’s Kneecap, a feature debut film about an actual Irish rap band by the same name, is bold, entertaining and boisterous – both as a cinematic piece and as a statement. It is also genuinely hilarious, which isn’t that uncommon for a crowd-pleaser. What is pretty rare though, is that a crowd-pleaser would also happen to be political and unapologetic about it. JJ (JJ Ó Dochartaigh aka DJ Próvai) is a teacher at a Belfast school, leading a nice, comfortable life that leaves him just slightly discontent. His girlfriend Caitlynn (Fionnuala Flaherty), an activist fighting…

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Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan (Knocking at the Cabin, Old, Glass) and narrative logic have rarely been on speaking terms. Shyamalan has been downright antagonistic toward narrative logic. A filmmaker more often concerned with the effects individual scenes and sequences can generate among audiences on the other side of the screen, his films have tended to suffer critically when they’re held up against the rules of drama or genre. Even then, however, Shyamalan remains a singular filmmaker, his self-financed works are constructed to elicit an almost endless series of surprises, some earned, many not, but always welcome, especially in comparison with the work of more studio-bound or -linked filmmakers where narrative logic reigns supreme. Shyamalan’s latest, the simply titled Trap, won’t dissuade his detractors, but in…

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A teenage girl and her geeky friend must use a magic paintbrush to save the world from killer kaiju in eighty-eight-year-old Murase Keizô’s debut feature, Brush of the God. Akari’s (Suzuki Rio) grandfather has just passed away and she doesn’t exactly know how to feel about it. They weren’t terribly close in life, but when she arrives at his memorial, she realizes that he meant a lot to many people. Tokimiya Kenzo was an artisan, a designer and creator of kaiju monsters for Japan’s popular tokusatsu (special effects) movies and television series. She realizes this when she runs into her nerdy classmate, Takuya (Narahara Takeru), a Kenzo superfan. The pair of teens are approached by a mysterious man who identifies himself as Hozumi (Saitoh Takumi)…

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