The Ones Who Grieve (Les âmes en peine) North American première at Fantastic Fest, 18th Sept 2026 The Ones Who Grieve (Les âmes en peine) opens with two sequences playing in parallel. In the first, a middle-aged man (Thierry Frémont) with a prominent red beard carves a grotesque mask from wood, and is then seen…
Loyalty is the key to friendship. A person’s willingness to stick by someone else, to ride shotgun with them and to have their back when they are acting questionably, committing crimes, or even conducting an iconoclastic mission that might bring down the very foundations of reality, is the true test of being a friend. As the…
Vertiginous (Le Vertige) at Fantastic Fest, 17th Sept 2026 “I’ve cracked the system,” declares Jacky (voiced by Alain Chabat) – repeatedly – in Quentin Dupieux’s Vertiginous. Jacky has come to the apartment of his friend Bruno (voiced by Jonathan Cohen) insisting on being let in to discuss something “really important”, even if it seems “pretty…
“What’s taking so long, man?” says Gus (David Binder), waiting on the living room sofa in the opening sequence of Jake Ryan’s Drain Flies. There is, evidently, no honour among thieves – for when Gus goes to look, he is obviously surprised to discover that the house is empty and that whoever had been keeping…
Memories of Matsuko (Kiraware Matsuko no isshô) first published by Film4 Even if Tetsuya Nakashima‘s Memories of Matsuko (Kiraware Matsuko no isshô, literally ‘The Life of Hateful Matsuko’) opens with a male voice-over and dizzyingly fractured images of different parts of Tokyo during a 2001 afternoon, the credit sequence that follows, in both its grandiose…
Missing Child Videotape first published by Dirty Movies for its screening at Motel X, 2025 Alone, lost and somewhat frightened, a little boy wanders a darkening forest, when he hears a tinkling chime. This is the sound made by Keita Kodama (Rairu Sugita), a volunteer rescuer who carries a little bell to frighten off bears,…
Buzzheart first published by Dirty Movies, for its screening at MotelX 2025 Buzzheart opens with text (soon complemented by disturbing archival footage) about behavioural experiments conducted on lab animals in the Sixties and Seventies, before the questionable ethics of these scientific intrusions made them fall out of favour. These tests were intended to determine the…
Her Will Be Done (Que ma volonté soit faite) first published by Dirty Movies, for its screening at MotelX 2025 It begins impressionistically, in the dark. A face, barely visible at all, emerges from the shadows, and then we see more faces, more clearly, as a small clan gathers around blazing flames to bear witness to…
The Old Woman with the Knife (Pagwa) first published by Dirty Movies, for its screening at MotelX 2025 Despite its title, The Old Woman with the Knife opens in 1975 with a young woman (Shin Si-ah), just 16. Bloody, desperate and at rock bottom, she is staggering – ill clothed and barefoot – in the…
The Pianist (A Pianista) first published by Dirty Movies for a screening at MotelX 2025 “In a near future”, as text near the beginning of Nuno Bernardo’s The Pianist (A Pianista) reads, Ana (Teresa Tavares) and her teenaged son Pedro (Gonçalo Almeida) are struggling, in different ways, to cope with the recent death of Jorge…
The Piano Accident (L’accident de piano) first published by Dirty Movies, for its screening at MotelX 2025 A piano is held in midair by a strap – and when the strap suddenly snaps, the piano plummets. This image which opens Quentin Dupieux’s The Piano Accident serves both to literalise and to mystify its title. For…