Tag: canadian
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....
Friday One Sheet: SEAGRASS
A Japanese-Canadian woman grapples with the death of her mother as she brings her family to a remote British Colombian island in Meredith Hama-Brown's Seagrass. This distressed, lonely key art, with its almost letterhead typography and design at the top makes...
Fantasia 2022 Review: POLARIS, A Gritty Bit of Original Myth-Making
There is magic at play in Kirsten Carthew's Polaris. It is set the year 2144. Earth has been ravaged and sent back to another ice age, one where the fish bleed green blood. Pockets of survivors eke out a violent...
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...
Vancouver 2019 Review: KILLER QUEEN, Love Letter to Exploitation Cinema
Nostalgia was the driving force for the creation of some of the most interesting and entertaining genre films (and television series) of the past several years. While it's typical for nostalgic movies to fuss over wardrobe, décor, and music selections,...
Vancouver 2019 Review: THE WORLD IS BRIGHT, Touching to Watch, Thrilling to Follow
Mr. and Mrs. Deng were at home in Beijing when they received word from the Canadian government that their son, Shi Ming, had committed suicide in Vancouver, where he'd been living. The notification contained little detail, and the Dengs were...
Vancouver 2019 Review: TAPEWORM, Canadian Cringe Comedy
One of the very first visuals in Tapeworm, shot on lovely 16mm, is a decent-sized pile of bloody human stool in a field. This is really the only such gross-out image, but it establishes the tone for Fabián Velasco and...
FOR THE SAKE OF VICIOUS: New Canadian Action Horror From Gabriel Carrer And Reese Eveneshen
Screen Daily reported yesterday that production will begin on For The Sake of Vicious, a new action horror from The Demolisher's Gabriel Carrer and Defective's Reese Eveneshen, on October 4th. If you follow the lads on social media it seems...
HELLmington: New Poster And Trailer For Release of Canadian Horror Flick
Uncork’d Entertainment is releasing Canadian horror flick HELLmington from writers-directors Justin Hewitt-Drakulic and Alex Lee William on Digital and DVD on September 10th. They are marking the occasion with a new poster and trailer. In 1999, outside the sleepy...
Vancouver 2018 Review: THE DARLING, Sadness and Dark Hilarity Abound
The Darling finds a young Korean actress, Lee Sun-hwa (played by Jang Jieun), spending some time abroad in Vancouver, ostensibly to visit her sister and brother-in-law. As she takes in the sights and interacts with the locals, it becomes clear...
Toronto 2018 Review: KINGSWAY, A Well-acted, If Slight, Dramedy
As a Vancouverite, my interest in seeing Bruce Sweeney's Kingsway stemmed almost entirely from the fact that it is shot and set in my city. Vancouver is, in fact, the third-largest centre for film and television production in North America,...
Review: THE UNSEEN, a Gritty-Indie Take on the Invisible Man
In a cluttered single-wide trailer in a snow-covered, anonymously dreary logging town in northern British Columbia, Bob Langmore finds himself disappearing. That it not to say that running away from his wife and daughter almost a decade ago to live...
Friday One Sheet: THE UNSEEN
If you quote the columnist on the poster, you get into the poster column. All kidding aside, I was a big fan of Geoff Redknap's The Unseen, a Canuck-indie take on The Invisible Man story, and the quirky original artwork...
Vancouver 2017 Review: BLACK COP Does Its Concept Justice
Between its success at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it premiered earlier this year, and here at VIFF, where it won the Canadian Feature award, Black Cop has become something of a sensation. Its concept is an undeniably timely,...
Vancouver 2017 Review: MAISON DU BONHEUR, a Lovely Portrait
Filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz's 2016 film, Never Eat Alone, won her VIFF's Emerging Canadian Director prize for that year. Now, she returns to the festival with her newest feature, Maison du bonheur. How the film came to be is a charming...
Festival Watch: Bloody Mary Film Festival, Open For Submissions, Celebrating Canadian Women Filmmakers in Genre Cinema This November!
Our friends at the Blood Mary Film Festival have announced the dates for their sophomore festival this November. The two day festival celebrating Canadian women in genre cinema runs at the cozy Carlton cinema on November 30th and December 1st. ...
Review: DEVIL IN THE DARK, Ultimately Scary and Admirably Evocative
British Columbia, my home province, is a wild and mysterious place. There's Vancouver, its largest and best-known city; its capital, Victoria; and a smattering of mid-size to small towns scattered here and there. Beyond that, the entire massive thing is...
Review: LAVENDER, Secrets Are Revealed in a Haunted House
Like many gothic ghost stories, Lavender centers around a woman with a vulnerable psyche and a shadowy past. In this case, the woman is Jane (Abbie Cornish), a young mother and wife who may have butchered her parents and sister...
Vancouver 2016 Review: THE LOCK PICKER Features Very Promising Talent
Randall Okita's debut feature, The Lockpicker, screened as part of the Vancouver International Film Festival's new Future // Present series, which showcases emerging directorial talent in Canadian film. The film is a claustrophobic -- mainly shot in tightly held closeups...
Watch Now: Trevor Juras' Short Film THE LAMP, Buckle Up For A Bumpy Ride
Trevor Juras' debut feature film The Interior premieres at the Fantasia International Film Festival tonight. As a taste offering of his work, Juras has put his award-winning short film The Lamp on Vimeo (it is embedded below) for public viewing....
