I reviewed Adam Pinney’s The Arbalest, which premiered July 29 at Fantasia Fest, for The Slaughtered Bird:
The tricky thing with magical realism in film is that if you use too much you end up with unwatchable fables like Winter’s Tale, and if you don’t use enough the movie comes off as jarring, as though the filmmakers can’t tell the difference between the miraculous and the credible. Adam Pinney’s The Arbalest works very hard at making a go of such a difficult theme, with mixed results.