Brave Citizen (2024) [Fantasia Film Festival 2024]

Deep down there’s a great movie within “Brave Citizen.” The South Korean film by Park jin-pyo has a great premise, and a great cause to fight for that could serve as a catalyst for an interesting superhero tale. Instead “Brave Citizen” is bogged down in so much exposition and sub-plots and commentary that is loses sight of its original intent. There’s no reason a movie like “Brave Citizen” should be so long, and I say that as someone that almost never cares about run time.

But Park jin-pyo and the writers take so long to get to the actual point that by the time we do get an idea what they’re aiming in the realm of superheroes meets bringing down the affluent, the movie has already worn out its welcome.

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Tiki Tiki (1971) [Fantasia Film Festival 2024]

Fantasia Retro 2024

Animation buffs might end up appreciating and loving this oddity by Canadian filmmaker and animator Gerald Potterton based mainly on how it was conceived. On its own, “Tiki Tiki” is a gigantic mess of a movie that tries to fit a square peg in to a circle hole. At seventy minutes, Potterton’s film is packed with about forty minutes of filler. Most of the filler is comprised of random scenes of people dressed as monkeys, and nigh endless musical numbers. And what kind of musical numbers per se? It’s mostly funk and soul music, which when viewed in context, is absolutely awkward.

Most times Potterton almost seems to forget that this is kind of an animated movie pitting his characters as back drops for an incredibly dull story about pirates and Monchhichis.

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Hell is a Teenage Girl (2023) [Fantasia Film Festival 2024]

There’s a great movie desperate to be set free with Stephen Sawchuk’s “Hell is a Teenage Girl” and sadly it’s only a pretty good movie when all is said and done. There’s so much lore and back story hinted at that the movie, at fourteen minutes, barely scratches the surface of. And we’re told that protagonist Parker is blamed for her dad being the Springsboro Slasher. But why? There are a lot of “But Why?’s” that will be spouted during the short. Although it is a neat, creative (if not wholly original) short, there’s just so much more tinkering and glossing up that needs to happen before/if a feature is ever greenlit.

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Five Favorite Mike Flanagan Productions—So Far [Fantasia Film Festival 2024]

This year, Fantasia will be awarding their 2024 Cheval Noir career award to U.S. filmmaker Mike Flanagan. “For his imaginative and heartfelt horror visions; boundary-breaking achievements in making soulful, character-driven genre television commercially viable without compromises; and the extraordinary work he’s done in popularizing landmark authors to a new generation, While it may strike some as odd to bestow an achievement award to an artist who’s almost certainly not yet reached a mid-career place, Flanagan has been so extraordinarily prolific and consistently brilliant in his output that the filmmaker has already accomplished several lifetimes of creation.”

In honor of his stellar achievement, here are five of My Favorite Mike Flagan productions – so far. As he has a long, rewarding life of filmmaking and film curating ahead of him, I imagine this list will look different in fifteen years.

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Five Fantasia Festival 2024 Premieres We’re Excited For [Fantasia Film Fest 2024]

For another year, Cinema Crazed will be covering the Fantasia Film Festival remotely. We’ll be bringing you reviews and articles of their newest films as well as their always stellar short film line ups. As is the case every year, these are five Features premiering this year that we’re Excited to Watch.

The Fantasia International Film Festival returns with its 28th edition from July 18 through August 4, 2024, returning to the Concordia Hall and J.A. de Sève cinemas, with additional screens and events at Montreal’s Cinémathèque québécoise and Cinéma du Musée.

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