Of the three plus years of the virtual Sundance I have attended, 2025’s felt like the weirdest yet. The films had varying qualities of success, varying from good middling to downright bad. As the festival progressed, I began to think this was the weakest year yet. That is until I …
Director José Avelino Gilles Corbett Lourenço’s I’ve Never Wanted Anyone More is the latest entry into a very, very long tradition – 250 years and counting, in fact. The film is a loose modernised adaptation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1774 episolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (indeed the …
Netflix’s Our Little Secret, starring Lindsay Lohan, is the latest Christmas movie from the streaming giant. Although the story is quite predictable, the film perfectly captures what the holiday season is all about. The film chronicles the journey of Avery (played by Lohan) and Logan (played by Ian Harding) who …
Following the failed effort of rebooting The Exorcist franchise with last year’s The Exorcist: Believer, director David Gordon Green returns to a familiar ground, the comedies. Nutcrackers, Green’s latest, is a film about tragedy in the first place. It narrates the story of the Kicklighter brothers, children who lost their …
I come from a big family of romantic comedy lovers, with the Hallmark Channel being a staple channel when we can’t find anything else to watch. However, there’s something even more magical about watching a rom-com as the snow is falling down outside and the Christmas lights hanging on your …
Musician and filmmaker H.P. Mendoza’s newest release The Secret Art of Human Flight looks like a B-movie and has an absurd premise usually seen in average-quality YouTube shorts. Known for his skill directing small-budget movies, Mendoza manages to take a film that even at its premise, teeters toward collapse and …
So, in most places, growing up, there are usually books that are required for reading in school. Here in the U.S., you’d find books like Catcher In The Rye, Of Mice And Men, The Great Gatsby, as well as books by Ernest Hemingway, Charles Dickens and such among those reading …
DC Comics has no shortage of quality animated material. This includes numerous direct-to-DVD films (the most recent being the Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earth trilogy). While those have offered mixed results, one corner of DC that has remained popular is its animated television content. HBO Max’s shows, such as …
The year I got divorced my job sent me to a career event for women in our line of work that purported to be a fundraiser for a domestic abuse charity. What it actually entailed was a group of wealthy women reassuring each other, with no sense of irony, that …
Director Alice Maio Mackay sits down to chat over zoom with Alise Chaffins about the comedy-horror film Satranic Panic. The Interview with Satranic Panic’s Alice Maio Mackay [Editor’s Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.] Alise Chaffins: I was super excited to watch this, mostly just because of the …
Musical horror comedies have long been a place to explore gender-expansive themes. Obviously, one of the most famous is the 1975 cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but there have also been cases made for Little Shop of Horrors to be a trans allegory. Genre films are meant to push boundaries, so seeing …
On the 26th September 2021, screenwriter Russell Hainline posted on Twitter: “Just had the best idea for a Hallmark Christmas movie holy sh-t holy sh-t holy sh-t.” On the 13th November 2024, Netflix released the end result of this tweet: Hot Frosty. Mr. Hainline’s tweet made allusions to Hot Frosty …
The problem with The Problem with People is that it is so determined to be light-hearted in how it deals with an unpleasant aspect of human nature – our talent for conflict – that it is neither realistic enough nor cheerful enough. It works very hard both to provide enough …
Thanks to streaming, the landscape of cinema has entirely changed. What once would have been a summer crime caper built for the cinema now goes to the small screen. Depending on how you view it, that can be both a benefit and a curse. The curse is that movies like …
While it is to be praised that so many dads are making movies for children these days, it does rather mean the dads are centering themselves in the movies, instead of the children for whom the movies are supposedly made. This is very frustrating, not least when it’s clear that …
Universal Language, the latest from Canadian director Matthew Rankin, follows Abdolreza Kahani’s A Shrine as another delightful Iranian-Canadian comedy hitting the 2024 international film festival circuit – a welcome trend, judging by the quality of these two excellent films. Written by Ila Firouzabadi, Pirouz Nemati, and Rankin, a vignette structure …
A good story is about people with a problem and their attempts to solve it. Sometimes the problems are large – aliens are attacking! – and sometimes they are smaller. In Sofa, So Good, the problem is how to get a cheap sofa across town when you don’t have a …
The manic pixie dream girl trope, where an eccentric young woman exists solely to expand and incite growth in a male protagonist, is criticised widely for lacking dimensional fortitude. Yet it continues to be utilised as a narrative framework, and too often without insight into the girl at the heart …
The need to feel a sense of belonging is something that everyone experiences to some degree most of their life. But there is no time in which that need is higher than during adolescence. The dual need to carve out your own path while not becoming too much of an outsider is …
Genre within art is a funny thing. They are arbitrary bindings that place films in little boxes, more often than not segregating the ideas within on aesthetic merits. Their necessity is up for debate, but sometimes the argument finds itself presented on screen. Director Cooper Roberts’ charming and energetic debut …