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While there's always been a certain darkness to the films of Mexico's Emilio Portes - winner of a fistful of Mexican academy awards for his Alex de la Iglesia styled action horror comedy Pastorela - that darkness has always been balanced out against a certain playfulness. But not this time. Not when you're dealing with the story of renegade priests and the slaughter of innocent children to clear a path for the arrival of the antichrist. Portes' next will be the very serious minded horror effort Belzebuth, a film that clearly has plans to expand Portes' international audience playing out in a blend of English and Spanish as the fight against the devil spans both sides of the border while pulling in a bearded -...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Holy cow. Pastorela's Emilio Portes goes against Cannes winner Carlos Reygadas (Silent Light, specifically) and "artsy" slow cinema in the final trailer for El Crimen del Cácaro Gumaro, the upcoming Mexican comedy that will most likely be a commercial success. But if the trailer is to be believed, Portes is about to face a massive critical failure. In El Crimen del Cácaro Gumaro (the title is, by the way, an obvious joke on The Crime of Father Amaro), a projectionist dies and one of his sons (Gumaro, played by Carlos Corona) inherits the old movie theater in a small town. With the help of the municipal president (played by famous Mexican television comedian Andrés Bustamante), Gumaro will eventually host an international film festival with movies of...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Mexico City -- Christmas came early for Emilio Portes' sophomore feature Pastorela, as the holiday comedy won best picture and director Saturday evening at Mexico's 54th Ariel Awards ceremony.  The Patron production, released in the U.S. last year by Pantelion, nabbed seven awards, including best original screenplay for writer-director Portes. Photos: Cannes Awards 2012: Michael Haneke, Mads Mikkelsen and 'Beyond the Hills Also coming up big was Everardo Gout's high-octane thriller Dias de Gracia (Days of Grace), a furiously paced portrait of violence in contemporary Mexico. Days of Grace garnered eight statuettes, with best first work going to

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Never, ever mess with a large man wearing wings. Especially not if he's a surly man. Most definitely not if he's a surly man licensed to carry firearms. See that picture above? Someone failed to take that advice.Blending comedy and action with a touch of horror Mexico's Emilio Portes will be bringing his latest creation to screens in November. A deliciously absurd affair that builds to a violent confrontation between the forces of good and evil Pastorela is a Christmas movie for cynics, the story of a church play that becomes very, very competitive.We ran the teaser for Portes' film a while back and now the full trailer has followed. It helps if you speak Spanish, obviously, but it's a dandy either way. Take...

29 more days to go until Fantastic Fest 2011 takes over Austin Texas! I cannot wait. 17 more films were announced late last week. Only one of those 17 films was on our “Film Guestimation” list for Fantastic Fest 2011. They still have yet to announce Opening & Closing films along with other Gala screenings so hopefully we won’t look like total fools. All we need is maybe half of our films that we listed to show up. Anyway, beyond the break, you can check out what is playing.

Apparently, more films will be announced this week. We will try to get those out as soon as we hear about it.

Events & Contests

100 Best Kills

One of the greatest long-running traditions of Fantastic Fest is the 100 Best Kills Party, where we sit in a theater together and turn the spotlight on the Grim Reaper of movieland as he disembowels, detonates and decapitates again and again and again.

Fresh off a successful opening salvo of films, Fantastic Fest is proud to announce the second wave of pictures for the week of September 22-29 in Austin, Texas. As always, it looks like an impressive line-up.

And seeing how this is the film festival that has launched such films as Zombieland, Trollhunter and The Human Centipede, you'll just have to trust them. They've proven time and again they know what's good.

In addition to the line-up of 17 new films making their world, North American or Us premieres, Fantastic Fest has some great contests and one hottie of a new director in Kristen Bell.

So, without further ado, here's the info for Fantastic Fest, Second Sequence.

From the Press Release

Fantastic Fest is proud to announce the second wave of programming for the seventh edition of Fantastic Fest, happening September 22-29 in Austin, Texas. The second wave includes 17 new World, North American and Us premiere films,...

Earlier we shared the first group of films slated to be at Fantastic Fest this year in Austin, TX. Today we have the second group that includes: Nacho Vigalondo‘s Extraterrestrial, Ti West‘s The Innkeepers, Lars Von Trier‘s Melancholia and Adam Wingard‘s You’re Next.

Here are the descriptions of the films from the press release:

Movies On Fire: Hong Kong Action Classics- presented by Agfa

The amazing Grady Hendrix of the famous New York Asian Film Festival will join us and introduce four surprise 35mm screenings of classic Hong Kong grindhouse gems (most not available on DVD) from Hong Kong’s exploitation heyday of the late 80’s and early 90’s, these movies are cinematic crystal meth: cheap n’crazy, they’ll spoil you for everything else. Designed to play to rowdy audiences who threatened mayhem if they weren’t delivered a dose of gonzo delirium every five minutes,...

If you're a fan of genre film, you've had September 22-29 circled on your calendar for months. That's when one of the most fun, depraved and intimate film festivals in the country once again invades Austin, Texas. It's called Fantastic Fest and it features a huge blend of action, horror and sci-fi movies that most people haven't heard of at the time, but we all hear about after. This year is no different. They announced the first wave of films [1] in July and today we've got the second wave. Most of them are new to many of us, but then there are a few that we've covered in the past: Nacho Vigalondo's Extraterrestrial, Ti West's The Innkeepers, Lars Von Trier's Melancholia and Adam Wingard's You're Next just to name a few. After the jump, read the full breakdown of the second wave of films. Slashfilm will...

VOD must be quite a profitable avenue for Magnet, as they will debut Lars von Trier‘s highly-anticipated Cannes hit Melancholia on the digital platform over a month before its theatrical release in November. Vulture has the official Us poster premiere (using the same key art as the rest) as well as the news of an October 7th, 2011 VOD release date for the drama starring Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland, Charlotte Rampling, John Hurt, Alexander Skarsgard, Stellan Skarsgard and Udo Kier.

It will then debut in theaters on November 11th, but it has also just been announced as part of the Fantastic Fest line-up. Check out their second wave of titles after the poster for the fest that runs from September 22nd to the 29th.

Aardvark (2010)

Texas Premiere

Director Kitao Sakurai live in person

Director: Kitao Sakurai, Japan, 80 minutes

Larry (Aardvark’s blind-since-birth protagonist) has an innate curiosity that...

Fantastic Fest is an annual film festival in Austin, Texas, founded in 2005 by Tim League of Alamo Drafthouse, Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News, Paul Alvarado-Dykstra, and Tim McCanlies, writer of The Iron Giant and Secondhand Lions. The festival which focuses on genre films such as horror, science fiction, fantasy, action, Asian, and cult takes place in September at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar, filling three screens for eight days and hosting many writers, directors and actors, both well established and unknown. We’ve already posted the first wave of films which was pretty impressive. Now the fest has announced the second wave which includes Ahn Sang-hoon’s Blind, Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia and aume Balaguero’s Sleep Tight. See the press release below.

Austin, TX–Thursday, August 18th, 2011– Fantastic Fest is proud to announce the second wave of programming for the seventh edition of Fantastic Fest,...