Tribeca 2021 Review: THE PHANTOM is a Cinematic True Crime Gem
With belching refinery towers against a setting sun being one of its singular widescreen images, Patrick Forbes cinematic and highly emotional film The Phantom, at times feels like a lost season of HBO's True Detective. The documentary covers the tragic case...
Friday One Sheet: THE EMPLOYER AND THE EMPLOYEE
The rare film from Uruguay to play the Cannes film festival, Manolo Nieto Zas's The Employer And The Employee released this key art from the festival that popped out in large part due to the 'scope but sideways' design. I...
Friday One Sheet: REMINISCENCE
It appears that between churning out seemingly thousands of variants of the Army of the Dead key art, design studio B O N D decided to toss off this Los Angeles sunset-inspired -- it is the smog that causes these...
Friday One Sheet: THE (Animated) FRENCH DISPATCH
It has been over a year since The French Dispatch (of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Star) was to premiere at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival. After numerous date changes and the typical COVID release dance seen for major titles, the...
Friday One Sheet: ALL LIGHT, EVERYWHERE
You may not guess that this week's poster is for a documentary on police body cameras. It is striking, nonetheless. The One Sheet resembles Mercury orbiting the sun (indeed, it could very well be a minimal poster art for Danny...
Review: TIME LAPSE, Sharp Sci-Fi Thriller
Danielle Panabaker, Matt O'Leary, and George Finn star in a thriller, directed by Bradley King, and now streaming on Shudder.
Friday One Sheet: INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS
We have looked at designer and artist Bryan Lenning in this column in the past. And on this warm spring day, from a city still in lockdown (in Toronto, 2021) I am pleased to highlight this muted palette, chilly, couch...
Review: PROFILE, Making New Mythologies and Morality Tales
Director Timur Bekmambetov's mystery-thriller stars Valene Kane, Shazad Latif and Christine Adams.
Interview: Timur Bekmambetov Talks PROFILE and ScreenLife Filmmaking
Timur Bekmambetov, the prolific Kazakh director, screenwriter, and producer, knows what he wants and knows how to go about getting it. He blew into Western genre awareness with a howl and a bang in the early aughts with his...
Friday One Sheet: BLESSED VIRGIN [BENEDETTA]
The new French poster for Paul Vehoeven's latest Cannes bowing film, Benedetta (aka Blessed Virgin), is all about tactility: The stitching on the hem of the habit, the ivory cloth, the texture of the skin around the eyes and face....
Hot Docs 2021 Review: MAU Designs Rules For Life
Watching the Bergman Brothers' wide-reaching, yet fleet documentary, Mau, on the life and career of Canadian super-star architect and designer Bruce Mau, I could not help but think of the final scene of Shaolin Soccer. After having won the big...
Hot Docs 2021 Review: WUHAN WUHAN Is An Engaging Display Of Empathy
Yung Chang's quietly effective documentary Wuhan Wuhan is both a time travelling machine and an empathy machine. Straddling the cinematic line between Frederick Wiseman and Robert Altman, high praise that is both obvious and merited, Chang's film takes us back to February...
Friday One Sheet: SWIMMING OUT TILL THE SEA TURNS BLUE
This minimalist key art for Jia Zhang-Ke's latest documentary on Chinese culture, Swimming Out Till The Sea Turns Blue, has almost a screen-printed look and feel to it. Although it may look to be a prosaic respresntation of the lengthy...
Review: LIMBO, Gently Absurd, Riotously Funny Refugee Experience
Amir El-Masry, Vikash Bhai and Kwabena Ansah star; Ben Sharrock wrote and directed.
Friday One Sheet: WEREWOLVES WITHIN
The glorious hygge of the poster for Werewolves Within cannot be understated. This upcoming horror comedy, which is loosely (very loosely?) based on the Ubisoft video game eschews (thankfully) the standard 'silhouette of an evil face' photoshopped in the background...
Friday One Sheet: A Tale Of Two Surf Docs, BANGLA SURF GIRLS and NO SURF ON MARS
Today is a study of contrast in posters for surfing documentaries. The first, Bangla Surf Girls, is a study in blue and pink and pastel for a crowd pleasing story of three female teenagers from Bangladesh who trade domestic drudgery...
Friday One Sheet: EMA
After a wee bit of a dry spell, it has been a good week for poster designs released online. There was the "Lone Wolf & Pug" key art from the Fantasia Film Festival, as well as Zhang Yimou's 1930s set...
Friday One Sheet: IN THE EARTH
Seeming to take inspiration in equal measure from the red-eyed creature in Horror Express and John Boorman's floating visage in Zardoz, this eye grabbing key art from Empire Design is for the new Ben Wheatley horror picture, In The Earth....
Friday One Sheet: THE MOHEL
Here is the key art for a Canadian short playing at SXSW that at first glance evokes the iconic poster imagery of The Exorcist. Charles Wahl's The Mohel, however, is about a Jewish doctor arriving to do the circumcision of...
Woche der Kritik 2021 Review: HORSE TAIL (Kuthiraivaal)
Saravanan is having a strange morning. He wakes up from a technicolour dream of a verdant field that is both night and day simultaneously, with an itch in his tailbone. It turns out that overnight he has somehow grown a...
