First thing I want to see about this film is the incredible cinematography by Benjamin Loeb. Capturing the long and harsh winters of Prince George, British Colombia, Loeb’s lens casts a clear, but perceptive eye with beautiful blue and green tones that blends in well with the bits of city life in the story…
I was talking the other day about how I’m tired of the writer trope in films. Misunderstood genius who sees the forest for the trees and lives a tortured lifestyle that feeds his pen. That’s right, he. There are lot movies about writers, real life ones too, but most of them are about men under that same literary trope. This is why it was refreshing to see an upbeat comedy about a female writer and her family at TIFF…
The desert is a poetic constraint that regenerates when people and their lives inhabit it. The wind blows over arid environments creating a fresh canvas at the light break of the sun. Oliver Laxe’s Mimosas plays out like a classical western film where there are potential double crossers, semi-saviors, and suspenseful stand offs. Yet this movie also offers so much more…
There is so much in the pursuit of sport that brings a passion to win…
The suggestions of magical realms within our own realities are often dismissed as part of the human imagination. Sometimes superstition and fantasy are ways people use to try to survive insurmountable truths thereby helping them navigate a world that they cannot fully understand. In Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour, the director…
Yermek Tursunov’s Stranger has been chosen by Kazakhstan as its official entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 88th Academy Awards, and rightly so. This gorgeous epic is replete with beautiful pastoral visuals on the steppes of 1930s Kazakhstan. It is the story of Ilyas (Yerzhan Nurymbet), a young boy who lives with his father among devastation…
A good writer leaves a lot for a reader’s imagination to let them parse the narrative vision in their own way. A good director doesn’t coddle their audiences either. They are highly aware that there are two cinemas you must consider: the screen they present their viewer with, and the screen within the viewer’s mind. In the case of Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise, there are…
Thomas Stuber’s A Heavy Heart is the complex story of a former boxer turned teacher and bouncer who life takes a sudden turn for the worse. In many ways, it’s both a gritty and an uplifting film at that. Thomas Stuber’s feature debut is deservedly garnering a lot of talk at this year’s film festival. Peter Kurth’s portrayal of a deteriorating Herbert is a tour de…
Although this is the first Apichatpong Weerasethakul film I’ve been treated to, his name does come with a reputation of expecting the unexpected. The truth is Cemetery Of Splendour is cinematic poetry in storytelling.
This year TIFF came to town in a giant swoop. Flooded with screeners and interview requests, this is probably the busiest I’ve been before the festival since I’ve started covering it. I’m trying my best to cover as much as possible considering the festival this year is incredibly diverse and some of them already have Academy awards written all over them…