Friday One Sheet: BLOW THE MAN DOWN
I did not manage to catch Blow The Man Down, Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy's salty Maine-set mystery-drama at TIFF this year. Had I seen this key art in advance, I might have tried a wee bit harder. Acting...
Toronto 2019 Review: DISCO Doubts Your Commitment To Sparkle Motion
Disco is a juxtaposition of cults. One is the intense dance competition circuit. Here, girls in skimpy, sparkling outfits, a deluge of rhinestones and sequins, with face paint to match, perform intensely choreographed contortions to thumping electronica as an expression of...
Toronto 2019 Review: THE PLATFORM Is a Dystopian Feast of Social Inequality
A man wakes up in a spartan concrete room, with a copy of Don Quixote, and a composed, elderly roommate. The number 48 is stencilled on the wall, and there is an open elevator shaft that divides the space. The...
Toronto 2019 Review: BLOOD QUANTUM Chews On The Sins of Fathers
It is 1971, and a lone police car drives purposely, if slightly lost, through the Northern Canadian forest. Its bright red cherries offer little light, and function more of a quiet warning to the wilderness which surround it. The Police...
Review: KILLERMAN, Criminal Worlds Collide, As Pots Boil
The opening moments of Killerman are a masterclass in moving money on the streets. In a sequence that runs 8 minutes or so, a mid-level money launderer first swaps a banker's box full of cash for a solid block of...
Friday One Sheet: THE REPORT Redacts Truth
Analog newsprint and redaction feature heavily into the key art for The Report. In noisy high-contrast black and white, Adam Driver in a pretty natty suit, is rendered in newsprint text with headlines poking out. "Fabricated Information" is underlined via...
Friday One Sheet: A HIDDEN LIFE
You are always guaranteed a great poster for the films of Terrence Malick. A Hidden Life premiered at Cannes in May, but here is a teaser poster for its Toronto International Film Festival screening. Set in World War II, and...
Review: COLD CASE HAMMARSKJÖLD, Pretzels of Truth and Performance Art
"This could either be the world's biggest murder mystery, or the world's most idiotic conspiracy theory." Two years before the JFK assassination, on the 18th of September 1961, the world was shocked by the suspicious death of the second serving...
Friday One Sheet: LOW TIDE and Orange Gradients
Learn to love your gradient. That is the heart of the sunset orange glow of the key art for Low Tide. It's different, and minimalist, enough to grab ones attention in a multiplex hallway of crowded photoshop nightmares (i.e. typical...
Friday One Sheet: THE LIGHTHOUSE in Glorious, Stark, Black And White
Robert Eggers' Cannes-feted sophomore film, The Lighthouse, gets a gorgeous poster, which matches the high contrast black and white trailer that also dropped this week. (It is embedded below if you have not had the pleasure yet.) It is rare...
Review: HONEYLAND, Characters In a Melancholy Tragedy
We first meet Haditze walking precariously cliff-side to harvest a wild colony of bees. With the sun gorgeously settling in on the valley, she makes her way back to the isolated homestead she keeps with her infirm octogenarian mother. It...
Friday One Sheet: JOJO RABBIT And The Handbill Aesthetic
A mixture of techniques in play make for an interesting, photo-free, text heavy poster for Taika Waititi's last film, Jojo Rabbit. The large splashes of text all over the key art looks painted with a wide brush. It being a...
Fantasia 2019 Review: IDOL, An Opaque South Korean Crime Procedural That Will Overheat Your Brain
Let us get this out of the way first: In over 40 years of watching movies and more than 20 years writing about them, this South Korean neo-noir was perhaps the first film to ever to leave me reeling to...
Fantasia 2019 Review: DARLIN', An Effervescent, Entertaining Exercise in Empowerment
There is a story told between teen girls, midway through Darlin', about survival. How do you deal with the constricting snake trying to consume you in the forest? You let yourself get partially eaten, and kick the shit out of...
Fantasia 2019 Review: KILLERMAN Feels Like a 1990s Thriller
The opening moments of Killerman are a masterclass in moving money on the streets. In a sequence that runs 8 minutes or so, a mid-level money launderer first swaps a banker's box full of cash for a solid block of...
Friday One Sheet: JESUS SHOWS YOU THE WAY TO THE HIGHWAY
This striking poster is for Ethiopian avant garde science fiction satire (or farce) Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway, which is the follow-up feature to equally strange, but more subdued Tarkovsky-Jodorowski inspired Crumbs (2015). Taken from a still from...
Fantasia 2019 Review: SWALLOW, Gorgeously Composed, A Film About Pica and Personal Empowerment
We are introduced to young house-wife, Hunter, in a pastel Christian Dior outfit. Surveying the picturesque Hudson River in Upstate New York, from the raised terrace of her expensive home, she is the kept woman of a wealthy family and...
Fantasia Review 2019: ODE TO NOTHING Tells a Curious Ghost Story of Death and Minimalism
In deep focus photography and an olive-pewter colour palette that is nearly monochrome comes a crafted and curious film out of the Philippines. We first meet Sonya winding up the innards of a cassette tape so she can keep...
Review: LUZ, A Stylish Experiment in Seduction and Possession
A demon or some kind of evil entity travels from a Chilean boarding school to a German Police station to ensnare the woman it desires to possess. The simplicity of this basic story kernel belies the stylish and convoluted manner...
Interview: Tilman Singer on LUZ, His Wildly Experimental Demonic Possession Film
In 2018, at the Berlin Film festival and then later at Fantasia, a wildly sophisticated student film by the name of Luz, flabbergasted moviegoers and blew some minds. The story of a demon attempting to possess 'the girl that got...
