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The Shape of Water has won the Golden Lion. Though winning at Venice hasn't traditionally translated to Oscar glory, I think this is going to be an exception.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri wins the People's Choice Award at Toronto. Fox's going to kill it at the Oscars (and The Greatest Showman has yet to show up, I bet it appears at AFI Fest).

My neighborhood theater is having a mini genre festival this weekend, so I'm wondering if any of you have seen or heard good things about Let The Corpses Tan or Junk Head. I already have tickets for Tigers Are Not Afraid and Hagazussa - A Heathen's Curse, so I'm looking forward to those, but I could do a double bill on either day and catch one of the others. Let The Corpses Tan is a great title, but I wasn't really impressed by the trailer.

Never heard of any of those titles..

Let the Corpses Tan is meant to be okay -a very arthouse Western, more about style, excessive cutting, etc. Might be worth a watch just for the visual experience.

I just realize "Let the corpses tan" is the French film "Laissez bronzer les cadavres". Haven't seen it yet but I've heard good things about it, might be worth a catch.

numbersix wrote:Let the Corpses Tan is meant to be okay -a very arthouse Western, more about style, excessive cutting, etc.

That's impression I got from the trailer. It looks like an exercise in cliched style and post-Tarantino fetishisized violence. Not something I'm likely to see unless the reviews are through the roof.

And Junk Head is a Japanese stop-motion animation that looks a bit like City Of Lost Children or 9. I might gamble on it if I feel like a double bill that day.

And they just added a screening of a very Irish, very Gothic horror called The Lodgers, so I'm going to check that out too.

Ah yes, I know the producers of The Lodgers, Julianne and Ruth, very well. I haven't seen The Lodgers yet but the reviews have been good. Let me know what you think if you catch it.

Will do. And the only remaining video store in Vancouver has a copy of A Dark Song, so I still plan to catch that eventually.

Tigers Are Not Afraid (9/10) – A beautiful, heartbreaking, inventive, and tragic piece of magic realism, in which a recently orphaned Mexican schoolgirl hooks up with a group of street kids who are on the run from both brutal drug gangs and the ghosts of their victims. The obvious comparison is early Del Toro, but I thought this was better than Pan's Labyrinth. It's the best film I've seen all year.

The Lodgers (8/10) – A very stylish piece of Gothic horror that manages to overcome a sense that much of this has been done before, even if the core idea feels fresh. On paper, the premise is a strange mix of The Others and Gremlins, where a brother and sister with a family secret live alone in a crumbling mansion haunted by ghosts who have a set of rules the siblings have to live by in order to avoid their wrath. Some people can watch endless reiterations of the exact same superhero story over and over again, and I'm the same way with this kind of sumptuous haunted house story.

Hagazussa (7/10) - A German arthouse horror that has many surface similarities to The Witch but falls a bit short in terms of execution. Both have a powerful sense of isolation and superstition, fully realized historical settings, and strong female leads, but there just isn't enough story here to justify the run time, hence the incredibly slow pace which just barely drags the film out to 100 minutes. It goes to some incredibly dark places, and the climax is one you're not likely to forget, but there's too much padding leading up to it. (That was my opinion an hour after watching the film, but I have to admit I had a lot of trouble falling asleep that night and experienced strange waking nightmares as I was trying to nod off, and images from the film still have the power to unnerve me thinking about them several days later, so it obviously affected me more strongly than I realized at the time. If The Lodgers falls on the safe, comfort food side of horror, Hagazussa is a far more challenging and daring film. It's deeply, existentially disturbing, almost too much so.)

JohnErle wrote:Tigers Are Not Afraid (9/10)

There's a screening in Paris at a festival in a couple of weeks, I'll try and catch it !!

Do it!