I caught No Rest for the Wicked as part of the 2026 Fantasia International Film Festival, where it made its world premiere and became one of my favourites of the festival. Fantasia’s Cheval Noir jury shared that response. Kasper Kalle received the award for Best Director, while Pilou Asbæk earned an Outstanding Performance Award for his work as Helge.
It has been 14 years since Casey Walker last brought a film to Fantasia. His horror-comedy A Little Bit Zombie played the Montreal festival in 2012, and he has remained connected to Canadian genre filmmaking since then, including as a producer on The Void and In a Violent Nature.
Someone’s Daughter begins before it gives us anything to look at. A tense, slowly rising score plays over the opening credits while writer-director Wiebke von Carolsfeld holds back the image. By the time the screen opens up, we are already in the middle of a kidnapping.
The Fantasia International Film Festival returns to Montreal from July 16 to August 2, 2026, and this year marks a big one: the festival’s 30th edition. This film festival preview focuses on 15 feature films that stand out across the Fantasia 2026 programme.
There is something telling about the path Sad Girlz has taken over the last few months. Written and directed by Fernanda Tovar in her feature debut, the Mexican-Spanish-French co-production premiered in the Generation 14plus section at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, where it won both the Crystal Bear and the Grand Prix of the International Jury for Best Film.
This preview focuses only on feature films, narrowing the broader festival programme down to 25 titles that stand out across narrative, documentary, genre, international, and spotlight sections. The goal is not simply to list the biggest names or the most obvious premieres, but to highlight a range of films that reflect what makes Tribeca interesting in the first place...
The Scout is not really about the mechanics of location scouting, even though it pays close attention to them. It is about what that job reveals. Sofia is always entering spaces, but rarely belonging to them. She is welcomed in, sort of, but only for a purpose. She is expected to observe, photograph, assess, negotiate, and move on. She is intimately present and fundamentally temporary.
The day before our interview, my partner asked me the most normal question in the world: "What is this one about?" I had an answer, sort of, but not a clean one. There is the surface-level premise that you can find on the internet, of course. A sexually frustrated hammer salesman named Carroll steps on a rusty nail and begins moving through an increasingly warped physical and psychological spiral. The world around him seems to decay as quickly as his body does. Ultimately, though, the film is difficult to pin down in any meaningful way.
On the surface, the obvious talking point is Charli xcx. Of course it is. She has become a household name in a way that few artists do, and Erupcja was shot during the strange cultural detonation of Brat summer. But the more interesting question is not simply how Pete Ohs ended up making a movie with Charli xcx. It is why someone like Charli would be drawn to this kind of low-budget, independent film in the first place.
Now in its 23rd year, the Calgary Underground Film Festival has long since outgrown any “local hidden gem” label. CUFF has become one of the most exciting genre festivals in Canada, and the kind of festival that keeps proving why programmers still matter.