Running from July 16 through August 3 in Montréal, Canada, the Fantasia International Film Festival is back for its 29th edition, featuring a massive slate of over 125 features and 200 short films, programmed across various sections and accompanied by workshops, exhibitions, artist talks, and more special events. Screenings will be held at the Concordia Hall and J.A. de Sève cinemas. Montréal’s Cinéma du Musée and BBAM! Gallery will also host additional screenings and other festival events. Ticket pre-sales went live at 10:00AM on July 4.
As announced in early May, Fantasia 2025 will be headlined by Ari Aster‘s modern Western Eddington, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal, which world premiered to critical acclaim at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Independent studio A24 will release the film in theaters on July 18. Just this month, the festival also revealed that it will have Fixed, the adult comedy feature from celebrated animator Genndy Tartakovsky, as its closing title. The animated film received generally positive reviews after its world premiere at the 2025 Annecy International Animation Film Festival.
At the same time, the genre festival will honor Tartakovsky with the Cheval Noir Lifetime Achievement Award, alongside master genre composer Danny Elfman, who will also lead a talkback on the animated short film Bullet Time, from director Eddie Alcazar. The Toxic Avenger creator Lloyd Kaufman will also receive Fantasia’s first-ever Indie Maverick Award, while actress Sheila McCarthy will be given the Canadian Trailblazer Award. Prominent Quebec producer Anne-Marie Gélinas will be awarded with the annual Denis-Héroux Award.
As it stands, this year’s lineup is so overwhelming that the festival had to announce its official selection in three waves. And of course, thumbing through hundreds of titles could prove to be taxing. But fret not. Here, Movies We Texted About pares down the imposing enormity of the festival’s genre offerings, featuring 10 movies, apart from the opening and closing titles, that seem promising and might just pique the interest of Fantasia’s beloved audience.
Terrestrial directed by Steve Pink (World Premiere)
About four college friends whose reunion weekend goes awry after the host, a science fiction writer, faces an uncanny, reality-meddling threat, Terrestrial finds director Steve Pink (Hot Tub Time Machine) in his first-ever thriller, where he explores the “darker edges of his sensibilities,” alongside a brilliant cast that features Jermaine Fowler (Sorry to Bother You), James Morosini (I Love My Dad), Pauline Chalamet (The Sex Lives of College Girls), Edy Modica (Jury Duty), Rob Yang (Succession), and Brendan Hunt (Ted Lasso).
Angel’s Egg directed by Mamoru Oshii (Fantasia Retro)
This 1985 Japanese sci-fi cult classic—a landmark collaboration between two prominent anime artists, Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell) and Yoshitaka Amano (Final Fantasy)—follows “two broken souls in a broken world” tasked to protect a mysterious egg. The animated film finds new life in this special 40th anniversary 4K restoration.
Death Does Not Exist directed by Félix Dufour-Laperrière (North American Premiere)
Following its world premiere at this year’s Cannes Directors Fortnight, which generated rave reviews, Canadian writer-director Félix Dufour-Laperrière is bringing his animated vision back home, as Death Does Not Exist makes it North American premiere as part of the fest’s Fantastiques Weekends du Cinéma Québécois. Over ten years in the making, the movie tells the story of a young resistance group taking up arms against a wealthy and powerful clan, only for the supposed revolution to go south, leaving a woman wrestling with grief and guilt.
Worth Reading: Our Review of Death Does Not Exist
Anything That Moves directed by Alex Phillips (World Premiere)
After gracing Fantasia with the world premiere of the horror film All Jacked Up and Full of Worms three years ago, Alex Phillips returns to Montréal with Anything That Moves, an erotic thriller rendered in fascinating Super 16mm that is part of the festival’s Underground section, starring real adult film stars Nina Hartley and Ginger Lynn Allen. Set in Chicago, the narrative centers on a sex worker and “his adventures making clients happy with orgasms and sandwiches,” a blissful existence that is threatened by a serial killer.
Every Heavy Thing directed by Mickey Reece (World Premiere)
Every Heavy Thing, the latest movie by Mickey Reece, of cult titles like Agnes, Country Hold, and Climate of the Hunter, is described as “a pitch-black comedy about an ordinary man thrust into extraordinary circumstances.” Motoring the vision is Better Call Saul’s Josh Fadem, who portrays a modest office staff at an online periodical who gets involved in a conspiracy after becoming a witness to a murder, a precarious situation that soon upends his quiet life. Fadem stars alongside Vera Drew (The People’s Joker), Tipper Newton (The Mindy Project), John Ennis (Rats!), and Barbara Crampton (Re-Animator).
Blazing Fists directed by Takashi Miike (Canadian Premiere)
A recipient of Fantasia’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016, Japanese maverick Takashi Miike is premiering three titles (two movies and an anime series) in this year’s edition, namely Nyaight of the Living Cat, Blazing Fists, and Sham. The sports drama Blazing Fists is particularly intriguing. Drawing inspiration from Street Legend, which chronicles the life of mixed martial artist Mikuru Asakura, who appears as himself in the movie, Blazing Fists is a coming-of-age tale that follows two teenage gangsters hoping to pull themselves out of poverty through a brutal sport that later catapulted one of them to super stardom. The cast includes J-pop superstar Gackt, Anna Tsuchiya (Kamikaze Girls), and Miike’s frequent collaborator Susumu Terajima.
The Nightmare Before Christmas directed by Henry Selick (Fantasia Retro)
Over three decades since its release, just a few years before Fantasia’s inception, Henry Selick’s stop-motion musical The Nightmare Before Christmas will be reintroduced to new audiences. Inspired by Tim Burton’s poem of the same title, the animated picture tells a story where Christmas meets Halloween, as lead character Jack Skellington, the so-called Pumpkin King of Halloween Town, comes across Christmas Town, a world so foreign yet fascinating to him to the point of turning his own town into one, which results in a series of unfortunate events.
Redux Redux directed by Kevin and Matthew McManus (Canadian Premiere)
This brainchild of Kevin and Matthew McManus, who are also behind American Vandal and Cobra Kai, exists in a loop, as its central character, in a consuming effort to exact revenge for the murder of her daughter, “journeys through parallel dimensions to repeatedly track down and annihilate her killer.” The revenge thriller, which stars Michaela McManus and Jeremy Holm, first premiered at the 2025 South by Southwest Film & TV Festival.
A Grand Mockery directed by Adam C. Briggs and Sam Dixon (International Premiere)
Shot in stunning 8mm film, co-directors Adam C. Briggs and Sam Dixon are making their feature debut with A Grand Mockery, tagged as “a grimy, experimental descent into Australia’s dark underbelly,” characterized by “a tone that veers from darkly funny to nightmarishly surreal.” Dixon stars in the movie as a man racked with “mental illness, addiction, and compulsion,” as the directing duo toys with reality and explores the character’s gnarly adventures in a hellish, grotesque landscape, which seems only fitting for the festival’s Underground section.
I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn directed by Kenichi Ugana (World Premiere)
Last but definitely not the least is this latest sight from Japanese writer-director Kenichi Ugana. Driven by his passion for independent horror filmmaking and underground culture, the director stages this story about a dispirited screen actor—played by Ui Mihara, of Lesson in Murder—who travels to New York with her seemingly perfect partner, and, in the process, meets a z-grade director (portrayed by Estevan Muñoz), who figures that she could be the star of their next film, thereby reigniting the actor’s passion for moviemaking. What follows is “a soulful and somehow quite bloody rom-com.”
You can find more information about the festival lineup and screenings is available on the Fantasia website.
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