It is so hard to figure out how other people think that a movie like Silent Friend, which lays it all out step by step, is just so incredibly cool. The fact that it is hooked onto a real tree in a real place – an enormous ginkgo tree in …
Benedetta Porcaroli won the Best Actress prize in the Orrizonti strands of the Venice Film Festival simply because this ridiculous movie would not have been possible without her spectacular performance. The Kidnapping of Arabella (Il rapimento di Arabella) does indeed involve a kidnapping but one in which we are not …
In 2023, the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) released a list of the fifty greatest Canadian films ever. At the top of the list, it was not the name of David Cronenberg, Sarah Polley, Jean-Marc Vallée, or Atom Egoyan. It was Zacharias Kunuk with his historical 2001 film, Atanarjuat: The Fast …
Director Maryam Touzani, who co-wrote Calle Málaga with Nabil Ayouch, starts extremely strongly with this tale of an elderly woman finally making her own choices in life, but loses the courage of her convictions. This is ironic as this is very much a story of how you cannot have your …
After solving not one, not two, but three murders you would think that the Thursday Murder Club would deserve a little break. But there’s no rest for the wicked, and when an old friend of Elizabeth’s shows up needing help, the rest of the club gets drawn right in. Before …
We don’t choose our family. Love them, hate them, they are our families, and we are stuck with them. Some of us are blessed with living, supportive ones; others not so much, and the rest fall somewhere in between. Black Rabbit is a story of brothers who fall somewhere in …
There’s never an easy way to tackle a real-life story or a story based on real-life events. The audience would go into the theaters or log in to their streaming platforms, expecting they would see something riveting. However, it’s not that easy, and filmmakers need to follow certain rules if …
Cotton Queen is the debut film of Russian-Sudanese writer-director Suzannah Mirghani and very clearly made for an international audience. The establishing shots of laughing teenager cotton workers watching Tiktoks make sure, even if we know nothing about Sudan, we know it’s firmly in the now. And while it is Sudanese …
Comedian Mae Martin’s (Feel Good) first venture into drama is a confused exploration of a dysfunctional town with a mysterious school. What has the potential to be a Lynchian mystery falls flat as it struggles to combine two perspectives. Told through two separate viewpoints, Wayward follows cop Alex Dempsey (Martin) …
Few national authors have the same clout and immediate recognisability as Scottish author Irvine Welsh. Paul Sng’s documentary Irvine Welsh: Reality Is Not Enough – co-written by Sng and Welsh – opens with a laundry list of ways Welsh and his work, definitions of national treasures, has reached adoring audiences …
Of all the hype bubbles that form around the first reactions to a new release, One Battle After Another generated some of the most effusive of this century. And I mean that almost literally, since many of those reactions contained the pull-quote-ready taglines that marketing departments love so much — …
The Cut, starring Orlando Bloom, is an intense film about all the psychological drama that goes on behind the scenes of a boxer determined to make weight and redeem himself. It’s gritty and massively thrilling and one of the most interesting films of the past year. That’s why I was …
Ron Howard is one of the most prolific directors working today. His films, like Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind, have stood the test of time. Whereas even with those winners, Howard has delivered misfires like In The Heart of The Sea and Hillbilly Elegy. It’s a varied career that, …
We live in a cinematic era fascinated by the origin stories of founders and their revolutionary creations, but not all of them seem as urgently relevant as that of Whitney Wolfe and Bumble. The promise of exploring the creation of a dating app designed as an antidote to the toxic …
While you may know the talented actor Jeremy Ray Taylor from It, for his latest role he’s branched out into the world of action comedy with London Calling. Starring opposite Josh Duhamel, the actor plays Julian, the LARPing son of a crime-boss who has to learn how to become a …
With Urchin, Harris Dickinson – one of the UK’s brightest young stars – makes the move from actor to director like so many before him. He does not star in this debut feature, making only an uncredited featured appearance early on in this story of a young rough-sleeping drug addict. …
I may sound like a broken record after declaring that Spider-Man, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, and the Toy Story series are my favorite franchises, but Star Wars was another one of my favorites growing up. The first DVD I bought with my own money was Revenge of the Sith …
Even before her debut feature, Sophy Romvari has become a highly regarded upcoming director among the online cinephiles. Her shorts Norman Norman, Still Processing, and It’s What Each Person Needs were part of the selections at the Toronto International Film Festival. Criterion Channel acquired some of her other films, such …
I am always on the lookout for a new Christmas movie to throw into the rotation. I love a happy, silly film, but my all-time favorite is It’s A Wonderful Life, the Christmas-adjacent movie that my dad forced me to watch as a teenager and has remained a staple ever …
This movie, for which the English title should be My Tennis Coach and it’s weird that it isn’t, is an affable Italian road movie about the coming of age of a wannabe tennis player. The entire thing is built around the nuclear-level charm of Pierfrancesco Favino (who previously worked with …