Friday One Sheet: PERSONAL SHOPPER
Hybrid drama, mystery, thriller, ghost story, Personal Shopper made a pleasant splash on the art-house circuit in 2016. It was one of several major steps towards the notion that lead actress Kristen Stewart stop being considered as a cog in...
Review: DUNE, Unquestionably Neato, Yet Feels Obligatory
Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson and Oscar Isaac star in part one of an epic adventure, directed by Denis Villeneuve.
Friday One Sheet: THE SPINE OF NIGHT
The neo-psychedelic, pink and blue poster for The Spine of Night hits kind of a Twilight Zone on Acid vibe, with a hint of Krull. Morgan Galen King and Philip Gelat's rotoscoped ultra-violent fantasy film is coming to the end...
Friday One Sheet: A BROKEN HOUSE
New key art from Akiko Stehrenberger is always a thing to celebrate; here for Jimmy Goldblum's short documentary, A Broken House (Hiraeth). A Syrian Architecture student in the United States, who smashed his own models meticulously handmade of his Damascus...
Friday One Sheet: THE HARDER THEY FALL
Scratchy, sunset backlit, spaghetti western vibes exude from the key art for Netflix's The Harder They Fall. Even in 24x36 'portrait mode', instead of the typical ultra-wide framing of the genre (or even a UK Quad design), the composition of...
Friday One Sheet: SPENCER (Also, Full Trailer)
We are looping back around to the detailed fabric and negative space of the key art for Spencer, as it is also an opportunity to embed the full trailer for the film (see below). I do love when key art...
Toronto 2021 Review: SALOUM, A Spirited Tale of Revenge on the Senegal Delta
The Saloum Delta in Senegal is a land of cannibal myths and cursed kings. Nowhere is this more true than in Congolese director Jean Luc Herbulot's supernatural skinwalker of a film that brings West African mythology to the criminal getaway...
Friday One Sheet: SALOUM
Forget the old Godardian nugget that all you need is a Girl and a Gun. How about just a big ass gun? The poster for Senegalese supernatural revenge thriller, Saloum, goes for that Sergio Leone western vibe, with a modern,...
Toronto 2021 Review: DUNE, A Handsome, But Stoic, Do Over
There is a row of palm trees in front of the outer wall of the capital city of Arrakis, the desert planet also known as Dune. They require massive amounts of resources, and have grown straight & tall, tended by...
Toronto 2021 Review: EARWIG, A Hypnotic Reverie On How We Cope With Adversity
Somewhere, in a small apartment in Europe in the early 1950s, after the War, there was a little girl named Mia, who had no teeth. She had a melancholy caretaker who prepared ice-dentures for her several times a day, which...
Toronto 2021 Short Film, Short Review: DUST BATH
I am cognizant of the fact that it might take you longer to read this review than to watch the one hundred and twenty seconds of this animated short involving chickens searching for scratch, and philosophizing on the circle of...
Toronto 2021 Review: THE MIDDLE MAN, A Deadpan Comedy about Life
The small midwestern town of Karmack is dying. Figuratively, as its principal industry, a rail-yard, have been lost to the vagaries of globalization. Also, quite literally, as there has been a lengthy string of fatal accidents that prompts the town...
Toronto 2021 Review: LAST NIGHT IN SOHO, Where Dreams And Nightmares Mirror One Another
Every film from Edgar Wright is a kind of gift. Especially to audiences who like to unwrap things over and over again, from the Rom-Zom-Com satire of Shaun of the Dead, to the Nintendo-heightened relationship foibles of Scott Pilgrim vs....
Toronto 2021 Review: DUG DUG Offers Lessons In Escalation
The musical montage is alive and well in Dug Dug, a profoundly amusing chronicle of the birth of a new religion in the rural backwater of India. The camera work, framing, whip panning, (crash) zooming, and often lingering for an...
Toronto 2021 Review: AS IN HEAVEN, Where Childbirth Is Dark and Full of Terrors
The opening images of pastoral horror, As In Heaven, sees the almost stock imagery of a young beautiful thing, dressed in white, caressing the golden wheat with her fingertips, as she walks through a field of golden harvest. You know...
Toronto 2021 Review: VENGEANCE IS MINE, ALL OTHERS PAY CASH
Petty gangster and entrepreneur, Ajo Kawir, cannot get it up. He channels his impotence into bravado and risk taking. He meets a girl. She knows kung fu. They fall in love. He goes to prison. She sets out on a...
Friday One Sheet: ENCOUNTER
Design house B O N D's key art for Encounter (currently getting buzz on the festival circuit, before heading to cinemas and Amazon Prime in December), continues a trend I highlighted here, about this relatively recent poster trope: The Vortex....
Trailer for Pablo Larraín's SPENCER
After the stylish and well-received Jackie, Chilean wunderkind director Pablo Larraín tackles the tone and character of another iconic political and deified figure, Princess Diana, in a "what might have happened during those few fateful days" in 1997. Casting a...
Fantasia 2021 Review: SATOSHI KON, THE ILLUSIONIST
Watching Pascal-Alex Vincent's summation of Kon Satoshi's work and life and untimely death made me more than a little bit sad. Not because the film is a poor tribute or account of one of the leading lights of Japanese filmmaking,...
Friday One Sheet: THE MIDDLE MAN
I remain committed to showcasing key art that makes good use of textured wallpaper. In this case, the poster is for a Canadian/Norwegian production from deadpan director Bent Hamer. Hamer's films are difficult to describe, oddball dramas, subtle comedies, ultra-niche...
