Toronto 2024 Review: SHARP CORNER, Emasculated Ben Foster Goes to Dark Places
There is a railroad trestle over Gregson Street in Durham, North Carolina, that is a bit lower than it should be. In spite of flashing lights and a few signs, several times a month a cube van or tractor...
Friday One Sheet: GULIZAR
A simple, melancholy image forms most of the design for the key art of Belkis Bayrak's Gülizar. A woman in a car presses her hands up to the glass, eyes downcast, as if saying goodbye to her world for the last...
Toronto 2024 Review: THE ASSESSMENT, Savage Science Fiction Parable of State Authority and Parenting
Giving a whole new meaning to the phrase, “we took a pregnancy test,” Fleur Fortuné’s debut feature, The Assessment, is a saturated, button-pushing provocation on parental anxiety. It is a Kobayashi Maru wrapped in a Voight-Kampff test inside the Stanford Prison...
Toronto 2024 Review: RELAY, Propulsive Paranoid Tradecraft
There is one line of dialogue repeated, over and over in Relay, like a mantra: “Go ahead.” It is spoken by nearly every major character as they communicate through anonymous telephone operators, to preserve each other's privacy. This aspect alone makes for a...
Toronto 2024 Review: U ARE THE UNIVERSE, A Space Romance
In the near future, a space garbageman, Andriy, is solo-piloting an aging space junker tasked with disposing of several kilotonnes of spent radioactive waste on one of Jupiter’s moons. Mid-journey, he gets the full Arthur Dent experience: First he finds...
Toronto 2024 Review: ANORA, This Palme D'Or Winner Is a Banger
The experience of watching Anora is akin to a spontaneous and unexpected invite to a epic house-wrecking party. It starts off with surprise and wonder, plunges into drunken euphoria, loses all your friends, projectile vomits on you in a car ride around...
Toronto 2024 Review: HARD TRUTHS, Funny, Savage, Sad ... and Hopeful
They say Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Equally so, the wrath of an aging woman who loses her internal compass or purpose is a terrifying thing. I have an fiery aunt who struggles with a neural...
Toronto 2024 Review: THE BRUTALIST, Grand and Unexpected Cinematic Epic
Out of the gate with its Vista-Vision logo and overture, The Brutalist promises the kind of grand Hollywood epic, and old-school cinematic hubris, that more or less went away 40 years ago with Micheal Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate and Sergio Leone’s...
Friday One Sheet: HARD TRUTHS
Faces go a long way in poster; there is a wonderful pairing here. The design for Mike Leigh's latest film (premiering today at TIFF) uses text, both the soft yellow of the title, as well as above the line and...
Toronto 2024 Curtain Raiser: Curating the Weirder Movies of Toronto's Mammoth Festival
The Toronto International Film Festival, now in its 49th year, was called the Festival of Festivals prior to just being shortened down to its four letter acronym, TIFF. The festival still is adhering to its original mandate of...
Midnight Dankness: Toronto's LoFi Remix Unofficial TIFF Pre-Game Hang
It was 2021 and most film festivals, big or small, were in an online only model. Perhaps due to its late summer sweet spot, The Toronto International Film festival managed a soft-hybrid, with a significantly reduced number of films, some of...
Friday One Sheet: ANYWHERE ANYTIME
Anywhere Anytime, pays homage to Vittorio De Sica’s post-war poverty classic, The Bicycle Thief, but updated to the modern delivery economy. Like the stripped down cinéma vérité of that film, which nearly single-handedly created a new aesthetic of storytelling on film, the...
Friday One Sheet: ANOTHER END
The second poster for Piero Messina's Another End features two lovers sleeping towards each other, almost touching hands, on an 'endless' bed of beige. For me, it evokes the key art for Atom Egoyan's 1997 Canadian masterpiece, The Sweet Hereafter. The...
Friday One Sheet: SKINCARE
In past columns, I have spoken at length on the art of crying on movie posters, as it is a mild obsession of mine. These images are almost always female (the notable exception being Get Out), and almost always in...
CUCKOO Review: Tactile, Gorgeous, Completely Daft Thriller
Hunter Schafer, Jessica Henwick, and Dan Stevens star in Tilman Singer's thriller.
Friday One Sheet: Trieste Science+Fiction Festival
The 24th edition of the Trieste Science+Fiction Festival gets a gorgeous illustration and design from Italian cartoonist Zerocalcare. Parasols, lanterns, and a jackhammer frame the characters from vastly different walks of life as twin moons fade off into the distance. ...
Friday One Sheet: THE SECOND
This beautiful watercolour poster for Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos's The Second is hiding a subtle secret in plain sight. The short film centres around a pistols-at-dawn kind of duel, and the underlying complexity of motivations across two generations. The lead...
Fantasia 2024 Review: GHOST CAT ANZU, Farts in the General Direction of Studio Ghibli
To the sounds of cicadas during a Tokyo summer, 11-year-old Karin and her father Tetsuya leave the city by train to visit a countryside temple where the caretaker is the grandfather she has never met. It is a grand old...
Fantasia 2024: SINCOPAT, Short Film Short Review
During the opening credits of short film, Sincopat, many festival laurels are initially displayed onscreen. Then, following a loud ‘bang’ on the soundtrack, several dozen more appear. This is a first for me, but it is in sync with the...
Fantasia 2024 Review: SCARED SHITLESS, A Creature Feature Worth Taking The Plunge
A friend of mine, an astute and well travelled film-lover, once told me their ‘big theory’ of audience engagement for most movies: The viewer will like the movie more if the main character is simply good at doing their job....
