The Fan and the Flower – voiced by Paul Giamatti, this precious short animation nearly brought a tear to Becky’s eye. It is wonderful.

Frank and Wendy – This almost stream-of-conciousness series of stories about two US super-secret agents has a lot of laugh-out-loud oddities but is generally insensible.

White Bunny& – this piece is very esoteric and intriguing…but it leaves a lot to question. One of those questions being: is there a point?

A Quiet Love – This beautiful quiet slow-paced love story seems to be misprogrammed for this festival, but we loved it. After his father dies a man in Germany meets a Danish woman and falls in love. She ends up with his passport back in Denmark and he is thwarted in multiple attempts to visit her across the border. Interwoven with a thread about dealing with parental death and the possibilities of fate, this is a wonderful film.

Severance – the first out-of-the-park smash in my festival experience, Severance features one of my favorite underrated actresses, Laura Harris (of “Fifteen”, The Faculty and “Dead Like Me”), and is the kind of thrill run fun that Fantastic Fest is all about. A group of military weapons design employees travel to a remote cabin for team building and find themselves facing the downside of their own company.

Apocalypto – another fully realized vision of Mel Gibson, we saw an early cut of Apocalypto. In this early cut things do drag occasionally, but generally this story of the capture of a jungle village Mayan being dragged into the city, and then his fated escape and chase is exciting. The general American public will mistakenly shun a movie that is subtitled, but the dialogue in the film is scarce enough to allay any fear of reading. (On a sidenote: one of the viewers drew parallels to a post-apocalyptic film that came out 25 years ago featuring a young Austrailian actor caught up in an extended chase.

Blood Trails – I have to believe that the writer/director of this film was cheated-on by his moutaing biking girlfriend and he wrote this to punish her. Unfortunately he just punishes the audience with poor performances from what seem to be good actors, while his suspense moments are just boring. The concept of a protaganist being stalked in the woods on mountain bike is promising, but it never delivers.