Canada
The Sabbatical isn’t your typical midlife crisis film – it is highly unpredictable in the best sense of the word.
I Am Heath Ledger is a deeply intimate look at the late actor, but fails to ask important questions about the man behind the mask.
Maudie works due to the central performance by Sally Hawkins, though the troubled relationship portrayed is occasionally too downtrodden.
Streamer is a tense, intimate and at times stunning feature that ultimately derails in its very final moments.
Two great performances are wasted in Rupture, a mess of a horror movie which sets up mysteries it doesn’t even know how to answer.
A true millennial romance, Scott Pilgrim Vs The World is a great action comedy with an insightful look at teen culture.
In this beginner’s guide, we explore Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s journey from psychological indies to mainstream blockbusters.
For a story we’ve seen over and over, Mean Dreams, Bill Paxton’s last film, is compelling, refusing to take the usual narrative routes.
Admirably performed, It’s Only the End of The World suffers from underwritten characters and a refusal to bring his trademark widescreen scope
Holiday Horrors provide a comforting alternative to the forced gaiety of the season – and Black Christmas is one of the best to watch.
Ice Guardians will broaden everyone’s view on the disparaged enforcers, framing itself as a plea to those who have sided against the bruisers without giving it much thought. After all, the lumbering men are just that, men, and Ice Guardians captures them and their role in all its complicated glory.
From up-and-coming director Pedro Morelli and first-time screenwriter Matt Hansen, Zoom is a fascinating fantasy drama about artistic identity. Tracking the lives of three central protagonists, Morelli miraculously creates a strange, circuitous world wherein everything is connected. Despite seemingly existing within the confines of each other’s imaginative works of fiction, comic book artist Emma Boyle (Alison Pill), movie director Edward Deacon (Gael García Bernal), and aspiring novelist Michelle (Mariana Ximenes) soon bleed into each other’s codependent realities.
People like to tout the virtues of ‘unique’ and ‘misunderstood’ independent cinema, but sometimes a film is independent simply because it wasn’t good enough to obtain funding. The problem then is that curious people like me are unwittingly drawn to pretty bad, unknown, independently made films. Well, I’m delighted to say that while Portrait Of A Serial Monogamist is not going to rock your world, it’s better and I would say surprisingly sweeter than the average unknown indie.
I was having a conversation recently with a friend who complained about how he gets annoyed when he sees child celebrities, as “they’ve already achieved more in life than I ever will and they are younger than me!” As a recent university graduate, without a firm footing into the grown-up world of work, I’m increasingly empathising with this statement, whilst also increasingly acknowledging how ridiculous it is. Why should I be bothered that people who are more talented than me are going places, just because they are younger?
Last year, Denis Villeneuve directed one of the most pleasant surprises of the year with Prisoners, an unrelentingly tense film about child abduction that presented intriguing moral questions while also providing satisfying twists and turns throughout. That filmed starred Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal. Gyllenhaal has teamed up with Villeneuve again in Enemy, a much smaller and much, much more mind-bending film than Prisoners.