You can’t win ‘em all. Sometimes the challenge with a film festival, as opposed to say a music festival, is that not everything you see will be good. Sometimes you may decide it just wasn’t for you, and sometimes you wonder why they even decided to choose that film in the first place. The Young …
It’s really a testament to the scope and variety of the things one can see at the Fantasia International Film Festival that my top 5 Fantasia films this year can contain a big-budget sci-fi Blockbuster and a movie so obscure and bizarre that I’ll likely never get a chance to see it again. The entire spectrum of film making is encompassed in Fantasia’s 2014 program, from the ultra-budget to the micro-budget, and all places in between. Old and new, comedy and tragedy (and mixes thereof), you can see it all at Fantasia, and no matter what it is, odds are it will be something you’ll remember for a long time to come. This year five films in particular left a lasting impression on me, and they seem to encompass that all-important Fantasia variety quite nicely.
In the opening shot of the Norwegian crime thriller ‘In Order of Disappearance,’ a plow thunders down a Scandinavian country road, clearing the path with massive snow blowers. It might be tempting to say that the film’s hero, Nils Dickman (Stellan Skarsgard) is like the plow, pushing anything and everything out of his way in his desire for revenge. But in Norway, they do things a bit differently, and this film is all the better for it.