The Last Thing Mary Saw (2021) [Fantasia Film Festival 2021]

Two young women find themselves at the center of unwanted attention after they are accused to evil doings. As they only love each other and are under scrutiny, the family’s matriarch dies under mysterious circumstances and everything comes falling onto the two young women. 

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Yakuza Princess (2020) [Fantasia Film Festival 2021]

Many times whenever a movie is adapted from a graphic novel, the movie should have a good jumping in point where you can easily follow along. The problem with “Yakuza Princess” is that it feels like you almost have to read the original graphic novel to understand almost anything going on here. “Yakuza Princess” isn’t a bad movie per se. It’s a beautifully filmed adaptation with excellent visuals by Vicente Amorim, it’s just that you will probably have a tough time following along with the mythology and motivations behind the characters if you never read the original material.

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Glasshouse (2021) [Fantasia Film Festival 2021] 

In this post-apocalyptic take on The Beguiled, a toxin called The Shred gets in the air and erases parts of people’s memories, giving them symptoms resembling dementia. In the midst of this, a family lives in a glasshouse, doing everything the mother believes necessary to survives. That is until a stranger comes into their lives and between the two sisters. 

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The Last Thing Mary Saw (2021) [Fantasia Film Festival 2021]

Writer/director Edoardo Vitaletti’s debut feature, The Last Thing Mary Saw is a horror drama that promises to be one of the most polarizing films of the year. It’s a return to the rising resurgence of folk horror much in the vein of “The Witch” and “Midsommar” but explores the more relevant ideas about religious oppression, sexual oppression, and the perils of the love between two young girls, which becomes increasingly dangerous over the course of the narrative.

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Brain Freeze (2020) [Fantasia Film Festival 2021]

Director Julien Knafo’s zombie horror comedy is a movie that teeters back and forth between what it’s trying to say and what it’s trying to appeal to. It identifies itself as a horror comedy and injects a lot of silliness involving zombie carnage, body horror, and even some poor animals, but mid-way it stops being funny and tries to convey some kind of social commentary. What the commentary is, exactly, is beyond me, but it never improves on the overlong, tedious exploits.

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Baby, Don’t Cry (2020) [Fantasia Film Festival 2021]

Director Jesse Dvorak’s crime drama is a bit problematic in that it’s a film that constantly jumps from theme to theme and never quite decides on what kind of story it wants to tell. It’s both about the immigrant experience in America, followed by culture shock often experienced by main character Baby. Most of the time she struggles with what she thinks are the norms for American culture, and this amounts to a script that’s never quite focused and feels ultimately under cooked.

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