TIFF Journal: ‘Kodachrome’
You know you’re deep in the midst of Oscar season when you see a movie that exists exclusively due to a single performance. ‘Kodachrome’ is based on a true story that’s inspirational and blah blah...
View ArticleTIFF Journal: ‘Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond’
‘Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond – With a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton’ is a portrait of two of the more intriguing comedy minds of the late 20th Century. Their last...
View ArticleTIFF Journal: ‘Mom and Dad’
Here’s a good idea for a sicko horror comedy: The world is suddenly stricken by a plague that forces parents to kill their children. The rest kind of fills in itself, in a good way. It’s the sort of...
View ArticleTIFF Journal: ‘Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool’
Sweet and so strange it had to be true, ‘Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool’ gives the celebrities-playing-celebrities bio subgenre a good name. It helps that this isn’t a predictable rise and fall...
View ArticleTIFF Journal: ‘Downrange’
There’s a benefit to simplicity in genre movies. Set up a single situation tense enough to stretch out for 90 minutes and you’ve not only got a genre yarn easy to produce on a miniscule budget, but...
View ArticleTIFF Journal: ‘Vampire Clay’
Some Japanese horror movies are achingly sincere and slow-burn to the point of tedium. ‘Vampire Clay’ is absolutely not one of those movies. Directed by makeup and effects artist Sôichi Umezawa, the...
View ArticleCannes Journal: ‘Capernaum’
It’s perhaps too simplistic to compare Lebanese director Nadine Labaki’s ‘Capernaum’ to last year’s Cannes smash ‘The Florida Project’, but since both films deal with the insidious nature of poverty,...
View ArticleCannes Journal: ‘Whitney’
There are two competing visions of Whitney Elizabeth Houston. The first is the angelic singer, part of a near dynastic family of soul singers who exploded onto the pop charts in the 1980s and set the...
View ArticleCannes Journal: ‘Under the Silver Lake’
In 2014, David Robert Mitchell’s slow-build ‘It Follows’ played the Critics’ Week selection at the Cannes Film Festival and took the genre world by storm. There was of course big anticipation for his...
View ArticleCannes Journal: ‘The Man Who Killed Don Quixote’
The term “quixotic” refers to the exceedingly impractical and unrealistic. Some quests speak to notions of romantic, adventurous reaching-to-the-stars simultaneously with a ridiculous, near lunatic...
View ArticleCannes Journal: ‘Border’
I’m aware that critics say this about films all the time, but the less you know about ‘Gräns’ (a.k.a. ‘Border’) the better. It’s a quirky, strange, often delightful mix of genres made all the more...
View ArticleCannes Journal: ‘Donbass’
‘Donbass’, the latest from Germany-based Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa, leaves audiences with a lot to process. Told through a series of a dozen or so vignettes, the film takes an excoriating look...
View ArticleCannes Journal: ‘Ash Is the Purest White’
Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke’s latest movie, ‘Ash Is the Purest White’, continues to mine many of the themes that have characterized his films over the last several decades. He once again collaborates...
View ArticleCannes Journal: ‘The Wild Pear Tree’
You need to know what you’re getting into when you settle down for a film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. First, you’re in for the long haul – his latest, ‘The Wild Pear Tree’, runs 188 minutes. Second, you’re...
View ArticleCannes Journal: ‘Yomeddine’
Superficially, ‘Yomeddine’ has the makings of a treacly mess, the kind of forced “feel good” film that uses the backdrop of extreme poverty to tell some life-affirming fable. ‘Yomeddine’ is the story...
View ArticleCannes Journal: ‘Wildlife’
Paul Dano explodes out of the gate with his directorial debut. ‘Wildlife’ immediately establishes him as an independent director to be contended with. Written in collaboration with Zoe Kazan and based...
View ArticleCannes Journal: ‘Knife + Heart’
Many cinephiles find a certain thrill about films done in the style of their heroes. Sometimes this works wonders – take Paul Thomas Anderson’s fascination with Robert Altman, or Scorsese’s with Powell...
View ArticleCannes Journal: ‘The Image Book’
For a period in the mid-1960s, the name Jean-Luc Godard conveyed a god-like figure in French cinema. A former critic who turned the film world upside down with his wild editing style, crisp dialogue...
View ArticleFantasia Journal: ‘Dans la brume’ (‘Just a Breath Away’)
When the apocalypse finally comes to Earth, there’s no way of knowing what form it will take. Might it be a plague? Or a meteor, like the one that took the dinosaurs? Cinema has been exploring the...
View ArticleFantasia Journal: ‘Nightmare Cinema’
Horror anthologies are tricky. Not only do they need to keep the audience’s attention through repeated changes in story and tone, but they also need to maintain consistent quality and visual language...
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