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The funniest part about MOCKBUSTER is that nobody involved has the luxury of pretending this should be easy. Anthony Frith isn’t walking into The Asylum because he thinks six days, CGI dinosaurs, last-second decisions, and corporate oversight sound like the perfect way to make his art. He’s doing it because the door opened, and sometimes the door to a dream looks less like a red carpet and more like a production schedule with no mercy. Ultimately, that irony enabled him to make this!

The 2026 Fantasia Film Festival lineup is already packed with the kind of discoveries that make the festival such a vital stop for genre fans, animation lovers, horror devotees, and anyone looking for work that feels a little outside the usual lanes. This year’s selections include world premieres, international premieres, shorts programs, documentaries, Indigenous horror, Italian genre cinema, underground vampire mockumentary, animation showcases, and more.

Air travel already asks people to surrender more control than they’d probably like to admit. You sit in an uncomfortable seat, trust a crew of people you don’t know, ignore every strange noise, and tell yourself turbulence is normal because the alternative isn’t very helpful. BLACK BOX understands that discomfort. The film doesn’t need to invent the fear of being trapped in the sky. It just has to press on it long enough until every blur outside the window and every sound inside the cabin feels wrong.

A family can teach a child who they are without ever sitting them down and trying to explain it. THE THREAD explores that idea in glances, corrections, routines, mirrors, hair, skin, music, and the small adjustments children make before they can even pretend to understand why. Writer/director Fenn O’Meally’s short doesn’t charge into those ideas with a heavy hand. It watches a household, lets discomfort pass through ordinary moments, and trusts that growing up between cultures can be felt long before it’s spoken.

Mary Oliver built an enormous following by asking people to stop, look, listen, and mean it. That sounds pretty clear until you consider how much noise most of us drag through a day. MARY OLIVER: SAVED BY THE BEAUTY OF THE WORLD understands that Oliver’s legacy can’t be reduced to a simplified quation. Sasha Waters’ documentary approaches her as a working poet, a private queer woman, a disciplined observer, and someone whose poems reached people who might never otherwise describe themselves as poetry readers.

BADLAND takes nearly three hours to make a person sit with a man who has already crossed a line most stories would treat as the point of no return. Francesco Lucente’s film isn’t interested in making Jerry Rice easy to forgive, and it’s not built around the release of watching violence turn into spectacle. Its challenge lies in staying close to someone whose damage has curdled into something monstrous, while refusing to pretend that the horror began only after he returned home.

THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL has the confidence of a thriller and the blood of something stranger. It walks into the room wearing prestigious clothing, carrying the names of Gregory Peck, Laurence Olivier, James Mason, Franklin J. Schaffner, Ira Levin, and Jerry Goldsmith, then reveals that its real interest lies closer to conspiracy, nightmares, and speculative horror. That tension between presentation and imagination is what keeps the film alive nearly five decades later. It’s too odd to be treated as a simple era thriller, too controlled to dismiss as pure exploitation, and too focused to let its wildest ideas collapse into cheap sensationalism.

Death has terrible timing in LIFE GOES ON. Bill is ready for it, maybe even eager for it, but the universe keeps hitting reset like someone is playing a twisted game. That could turn grim fast, and in a lesser short, the setup might have leaned too hard into either darker humor or sentimentality. Writers/directors Daniel Audritt and Kat Butterfield take the stranger route by making the repetition funny first, sad second, and healing by the time it’s over.

ESCAPE TO ATHENA has the sunny, overstuffed personality of a movie that knows half its appeal is watching famous faces wander through wartime Greece with explosives nearby. Roger Moore as a morally flexible Austrian officer, Telly Savalas as a resistance leader, David Niven as an archaeology professor, Elliott Gould as a captured entertainer, Claudia Cardinale as a brothel madam with political ties, Richard Roundtree in soldier mode, Stefanie Powers brings old-Hollywood showmanship, and Sonny Bono as an Italian cook shouldn’t all belong in the same World War II adventure. The fact that they do is absolutely why the film has so much charm and the source of nearly every problem I have here.

The dust, cannon smoke, and George Peppard’s confidence do so much of the depth of work in CANNON FOR CORDOBA, a 1970 western that knows exactly what kind of movie it wants to be, even when it doesn’t always know how to make every piece matter. It has a dangerous trek into hostile territory, revenge simmering inside the group, a fortress waiting in the distance, and enough explosions to keep the screen busy whenever the story starts to sag. That combination doesn’t make it an overlooked legend, but it makes it a piece of genre filmmaking that offers plenty of lessons.

Anthony Selvon doesn’t need a stage that looks expensive. He doesn’t need a wall of screens, a roaring crowd, or the artificial polish that usually comes with men who sell certainty for a living. Give him a brick wall, a room, and enough silence between sentences, and he can still make his audience lean forward. That’s part of what makes I AM THE PRIZE anxious from the start. The film understands that influence isn’t always dressed like a pageant. Sometimes it comes through the door calmly, in a fitted suit, with carefully chosen language and a face that suggests he already knows the answer to every insecurity in the room.

The most memorable parts of FABRIC aren’t the runway images, though those have their own appeal. The film is at its strongest when it watches hands at work. Measuring, cutting, stitching, adjusting, correcting, because they all become more than technical gestures. They’re evidence of people building their lives through precision, patience, and skill in a world that too often talks about refugees as a problem to be managed rather than as people with talent, ambition, and futures worth investing in.

Action movies set against real-world conflict have to walk a narrow line. Push too far into exhibition, and the pain becomes decoration. Push too far into seriousness, and the movie can start acting embarrassed by the genre it belongs to. MAN OF WAR doesn’t always avoid those, but it does understand that every firefight needs something human underneath it. William Kaufman constructs the film as a tactical rescue thriller, then keeps trying to drag the violence back toward people who can’t simply walk away from the battlefield.

A glass of water shouldn’t feel like a warning, but ANIMALS. makes even the smallest act of hospitality seem dangerous. The short takes us into a house already marked by absence, where Zoya is sorting through the emotional aftermath of her mother’s death. Her grief isn’t presented as some grand breakdown. It’s in the air, in the quiet, in the sense that this place still belongs to someone who isn’t there anymore. Then Amelia arrives at the door with a story about an Airbnb mix-up, and the film turns the familiar into a trap. Zoya doesn’t invite disaster in because she’s foolish. She does it because most decent people have been trained to apologize for someone else’s inconvenience.

Lucile Hadžihalilović’s films don’t have any desire to explain themselves so much as seal the viewer inside a room and change the temperature, degree by degree. THE WORLDS OF LUCILE HADŽIHALILOVIĆ gathers four features that feel connected by instinct rather than formula: INNOCENCE, EVOLUTION, EARWIG, and THE ICE TOWER. Each one has its own rules, rituals, and textures, though all of them expand on childhood, control, desire, fear, and transformation without turning those ideas into easy resolutions. This Severin collection works because it understands that Hadžihalilović isn’t a filmmaker working strictly with plot mechanics. She’s a filmmaker of environments, thresholds, and things left unsaid.

SHADOWS OF WILLOW CABIN feels less interested in the workings of horror mechanics than emotional excavation. Writer/director Joe Fria’s debut feature uses supernatural horror almost as an extension of collapse, where ghosts, time looping, and whispering walls become manifestations of shame, repression, loneliness, and self-denial that have been rotting beneath the surface long before either character sets foot in the cabin.

Some movies make more sense when treated as rescued artifacts than as a lost classic. MAGNIFICENT BODYGUARDS is exactly that kind of discovery, a strange, unruly, fascinating martial arts adventure that’s easier to appreciate when you stop expecting it to be like everything else. This isn’t top-tier Jackie Chan, and it isn’t one of the genre’s great buried triumphs. It’s a scrappy 1978 curiosity with weapons flying at the camera, bandits crawling out of every corner, a story that keeps tripping over its own twists, and enough energy to make the chaos feel like part of the attraction.

By the time Hollywood finally figured out Jackie Chan, he’d already spent decades making the argument that he was more than just a clone of Bruce Lee. JACKIE CHAN’S BREAKOUT HITS catches him in that strange, exhilarating stretch where the rest of the world was catching up, but he wasn’t waiting for anyone. These six films, gathered from the mid-to-late 1990s, don’t just show a star on the verge of larger American fame. They show an artist, stunt performer, comic actor, choreographer, and daredevil technician doing what he needed to translate himself for a global audience without surrendering the thing that made him different in the first place.

WAKE IN FRIGHT begins with the outback stretching in every direction, the horizon looks endless, and John Grant should be passing through on his way to something better. Instead, Ted Kotcheff turns that sunburnt emptiness into a trap. The film doesn’t need ghosts, masked killers, or elaborate plotting to become unnerving. It only needs a teacher with too much pride, a town with too much beer, and a social setting where refusing another drink feels more dangerous than taking one.

Hammer horror has been packaged, repackaged, praised, dismissed, rescued, mocked, worshiped, and misunderstood so many times that another box set branding their name could have easily felt like just another set for collectors who already know the story by heart. Severin’s SANGSTER DIRECTS HAMMER avoids that because it isn’t built like a generic “greatest hits” victory lap. It’s stranger, more specific, and more valuable than that. This seven-disc collection narrows its focus to Jimmy Sangster’s three Hammer directing efforts, and that focus is exactly what makes the set feel so essential. There’s something magical in this set!

THE WICKER MAN has spent more than fifty years being treated like some sacred object by horror fans, and CHILDREN OF THE WICKER MAN begins from the idea that even the most sacred objects still cast shadows. Robin Hardy’s 1973 folk horror classic has been studied, reconstructed, remade, mythologized, and held up as one of the strange miracles of British cinema. It deserves much of that praise. It’s also the film that, for Hardy’s sons Justin and Dominic, carries a much more private meaning. To them, THE WICKER MAN isn’t only a brilliant piece of genre history. It’s a family wound with a cult following.

Before getting into the review itself, I want to acknowledge and appreciate that POSSIBILITIES is presented with open audio description throughout. As someone who doesn’t personally rely on audio description, I recognize how meaningful that access can be for blind, low-vision, and visually impaired viewers, while also making the film’s commitment to inclusion part of the experience for everyone watching. Most people know the first act of Helen Keller’s life, and far too little about everything that followed. POSSIBILITIES works to fill in that gap with a documentary that isn’t interested in retelling the familiar story. It uses Keller’s legacy as a starting point, then moves toward the blind and low-vision artists, professionals, advocates, performers, educators, technologists, and everyday adults whose lives speak to a larger idea of independence.

LUCKY STRIKE builds tension around a battlefield that feels almost quaint by modern standards, then treats that like a lifeline, a weapon, and a prayer all at once. A wounded American soldier is trapped behind German lines during the Battle of the Bulge, separated from his unit, surrounded by enemy movement, and dependent on a Motorola SCR-300 radio to survive long enough to make it home. That kind of premise can turn into the idea that survival comes down to cold air, bad odds, and the thin hope that someone on the other end of the signal is still listening.

FOR THE LOVE OF A WOMAN understands that family history rarely comes with a perfect explanation. It comes through fragments, omissions, letters left too late, and people who spent decades surviving choices they never learned how to name. Guido Chiesa’s adaptation of Meir Shalev’s THE LOVES OF JUDITH reaches for that uneasy space between mystery and inheritance, following Esther Horwitz, an American woman in the 1970s whose mother’s death sends her toward Israel and toward a buried story from British Mandate Palestine. The movie has the shape of a romantic historical saga, but its better instincts are quieter than that. A daughter trying to understand why love, shame, and silence have been passed down to her like family property.

There’s a meaningful, painful story buried inside THE GOAT, and the frustrating thing is how often the film seems to know it. Ilaria Borrelli’s English/Arabic language drama has urgency, anger, and a young lead performance strong enough to hold attention, even when the movie around it keeps buffing complex issues down to blunt dramatic points.