Parker Mott is a film critic and screenwriter based in Toronto, ON. He writes for Scene Creek, Movie Knight, Film Slate Magazine, The Final Take, and now yours truly Next Projection. He intends to purvey thoughtful writings on film that deeply examine the history of the form, and to initiate mindful discussion afterwards. His favourite and most relatable filmmaker is Paul Thomas Anderson. But to declare a best movie? No way, or not at this moment in his life.
The Walk is a superb end-of-summer popcorn flick. It is able to truly use the tools and techniques of modern computer-generated imagery so that they heighten the emotions of the story on screen. In this age of Marvel Mania, true action-adventure spectacle is rare. Today, CG technology has become cinema’s greatest blight …
Paul Thomas “P.T.” Anderson, like another well-known “Anderson” of his generation, achieved success as a writer and director of movies at a remarkably young age. It was January 1996, and Anderson was 26 years old, when Hard Eight, originally titled Sydney (to honour its director, we will call it the latter from here on out) had its initial release; this was one month prior to the theatrical release of …
Eventually, they have to grow up. The twenty-somethings of the “mumblecore” movies, a sub-genre that typically follows single, professionally insecure young adults through a naturalistic lens, have arrived at the familial crossroads in Adult Beginners. Here, the characters are beyond (but not by much) their earlier years of reckless abandon and starting to face the prospect of parenthood – or what …
Every April for the last 6 years, screenwriters - from the established to the aspiring – have convened at a local venue that, for two days, houses some of today’s top working screenwriters in the film and television industry. This assembly of scribes makes up the Toronto Screenwriting Conference (TSC), which was hosted last weekend at Daniels Spectrum in Regent Park here in Toronto. Previous years have welcomed guests of the …
[REC]4: Apocalypse is a detour from the previous three Spanish [REC] horror films. Though we should count [REC] 3: Genesis out since it wasn’t directed by Jaume Balagueró, who helmed the first two films and now this fourth entry, Apocalypse. The new film, which takes place immediately after the second and is situated on an oil tanker in the middle of the ocean, deviates from…
Romantic comedies seem to bring out the inner cynic in all of us, since so few of them are able to convince us of the central romance at hand. When the characters come together at the end, we often don’t feel they’ve grown or deserve each other– and isn’t that frustrating? Next to hardboiled action flicks, the “rom-com” is one of cinema’s most disreputable genres, and …
A Most Wanted Man opens on the still waters of a canal coming to a roil as an undisclosed boat passes by in the waking dawn of the morning. The shot is held for an extended period of time, allowing the atmosphere and meaning to naturally reveal itself. It’s an effective metaphor for the imminent eruption of repressed emotions …
It’s funny how Boyhood is considered a Perfect Movie (currently ranked 100 percent on critic aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes.com) when its director Richard Linklater clearly botches one of the film’s first shots: As boy wonder Mason Jr., played over the course of 12 years by Ellar Coltrane, marvels at shapely clouds in the sky …
If this were 1966, Young & Beautiful would star Charlotte Rampling in the lead role here played with similar wisps of mystery and elegance by newcomer Marine Vacth. Vacth has the same heavy-lidded, freckled, and inscrutable stare that has and still defines Rampling’s mystique –what actor Dirk Bogarde called “The Look”in the 2011…
The clever idea behind Neighbors, casting Seth Rogen in a gross-out comedy as a domesticated daddy, fails to achieve its full potential of hilarity. Neighbors tries so hard to amuse audiences with a bombardment of dick jokes and profanity that enjoyment of this movie can only really come from caving to the film’s arbitrary pace and…