Has there ever been a movie with prominent product placement for a porn website? Sex Tape certainly has it and plenty other glaring moments that feel packaged. Sex Tape stars two famous, marketable leads following a quirky, exciting premise that maintains the successful raunchiness of their previous collaboration, Bad Teacher, with …
Screenwriter-director Kudo Kankuro’s third feature combines beautiful whimsicality with satirical, perceptive commentary on the social fabric of communities, in a way that only Japanese cinema can do. The opening sequence establishes this whimsicality immediately, as it presents the titular character’s propensity to fantasise since he was …
Sono Sion’s kinetic love letter to amateur filmmaking and yakuza comedy begins with an unlikely sequence: a toothpaste commercial with a little girl singing and dancing. But what at first glance seems like an insert of gratuitous folly on Sono’s part is in retrospect an integral narrative detail. This opening sequence is also …
Live-action manga adaptations can be overwhelming for the uninitiated. They can also be trying because they are oftentimes unbending in their fidelity to manga spatial/stylistic grammar: over-the-top gestures, rubbery facial expressions, strident dialogue delivery; frequent frantic successions of shots filled to the brim with colourful …
Borgman opens like something out of a Beckett play, then proceeds to resemble the work of Michael Haneke as it moves along. In its first half, the film strings together a series of mysterious happenings with vaguely supernatural undertones, weird moments that are striking in and of themselves but never quite coalesce into something much …
Melissa McCarthy has created quite the career niche for herself. From her success with Bridesmaids to her role in The Heat, the actress has played characters that are lost in their own delusions, much to the chagrin of their straight-laced counterparts. She is the wisecracker and the lovable goof, but…
There is a countless number of self-referential films on the craft of filmmaking, the technical artwork and the industry itself, especially centered on Hollywood. Truffaut’s La Nuit Américaine, Donen’s and Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain and Fellini’s Otto e mezzo are among these successful pictures reflecting not only on the status of a film but its effect on the audience and the…
Shared living arrangements are mostly common among the younger generation, especially among students who split the costs of otherwise unaffordable apartments. Ralf Westhoff however, the writer, director and producer of Wir sind die Neuen or “We Are the New People”, introduces his audience to an unusual flat share that clashes with the norm. The comedy, shown in the
As part of the Queer Outlaw exhibit, TIFF Bell Lightbox are giving filmgoer’s a treat with a Bruce LaBruce film retrospective. LaBruce’s films encompass a rebellious element that tests cinematic techniques and distorts its pornographic and experimental foundations. In Raspberry Reich, LaBruce infuses his unique methods with …
In a time when under-age girls are being objectified by a male director’s lense, female characters are written as merely a love interest or wet blanket for their male counterpart or generally given less to do in film, Happy Christmas is a refreshing exception to the misogynistic rule. Even though it was penned and directed by a guy, it boasts not one, not …