Best of Fantastic Fest 2025: Part 1
Another year, another Fantastic Fest in the books. Here are the best films I watched at the fest this year…
Fantastic Fest 2025 - Mary Bronstein Q&A
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Cutting to the chase: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You was the best film I watched at Fantastic Fest 2025. Rose Byrne gives a career-best performance, playing a mother who’s trying to keep her life in balance. From the very first frame, we’re tossed into Bryne’s character’s mindset. I attended the screening with a live Q&A with writer-director Mary Bronstein, where she described shooting the film with the camera placed inches away from Byrne’s face. The unsettling intimacy and unrelenting pace make it difficult at times to sit still during this, but that’s entirely the point.
The Piano Accident
It’s always a joy to see a new Quentin Dupieux, especially if it plays at Fantastic Fest (Dupieux's Smoking Causes Coughing was a Fantastic Fest 2022 favorite of mine). Dupieux has a unique style of dark humor, and he always manages to find interesting original material to work with, and The Piano Accident is no exception. Adèle Exarchopoulos stars as a social media influencer who hides away at a remote house in the mountains of France. The film slowly reveals what dark secret she’s hiding from, which is both shocking and frankly not that unrealistic in the age of craven social media content creation. Exarchopoulos delivers an incredible performance.
Cruel Jaws
Not a new film, but one worth shouting out. The wonderful folks at American Genre Film Archive hosted this special Fantastic Fest screening of the 1995 film that completely blew the house down. Forget “guilty pleasure”; this one goes beyond just laughing at its ill-conceived premise (an authorized Jaws sequel made on the super cheap by Italian producers in Florida, which scapes together footage from other films). You have to see it to believe it.
The Forbidden City
A Chinese-Italian gangster martial arts movie that manages to combine two genres into one sweeping epic. Set in Rome’s Chinatown, a war breaks out between rival gangs. Not too often does a film so confidently show us a world we don’t normally see. The two leads, Enrico Borello and Yaxi Liu, come together for the sake of justice in a corrupt world. Part mob movie, part action, and part romance; The Forbidden City is a sensation.
More coverage:
Best of Fantastic Fest 2025: Part 2
Best of Fantastic Fest 2025: Part 3
