Circling back to the achievements he made wth his breakout doc Sharkwater, filmmaker/conservationist Rob Stewart checks in in the status of sharks in his final film Sharkwater: Extinction. The documentary, however, takes on a parallel meaning because it’s not only a swan song to an endangered species, it’s also a touching goodbye to Stewart and his career in activism.
Pogey Beach offers a predicament: it’s a comedy that’s not necessarily funny, but you’ll still laugh for the right reasons. Jeremy Larter’s slacker comedy will put the viewer in more of a fugue state than sun stroke ever could.
Netflix’s sports drama High Flying Bird is exactly the film you expect from Academy Award winning director Steven Soderbergh (Traffic). Using the experimental “look” of last year’s underrated Unsane and the foreboding “feel” of Contagion, High Flying Bird gives a fly-on-the-wall perspective of a sports agent (André Holland) as he senses fast-forming cracks in his career during an NBA lockout.
NOTE: Wonders of the Sea is currently being screened in 3D across Canada, but this review reflects the 2D version of the film. Wonders of the Sea has everything that you would get out of an uninterrupted computer screensaver of the ocean floor: opulent underwater visuals of fish and undefinable critters, and crossover transitions that meld everything together. The screensaver is better, however, because it’s quiet. Wonders of the Sea is informative, but there are too many…
I’ve been hard on Illumination in the past, but for a good reason. Universal’s animation company always seemed to be borrowing from other brands, from copycat plots to specific character designs. This makes the studio’s version of Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch a bit of an anomaly. It’s an existing, well known property that could’ve been another clone but, instead, Illumination has provided a new take on the popular Dr. Seuss curmudgeon, which also includes luscious animation…
Into Invisible Light would have had better compatibility on stage than how it currently plays in its cinematic scope. As it is, the movie’s fine – decent even. But by projecting itself to fill a larger space, Shelagh Carter’s modest dialogue-driven drama calls attention to its barebones aesthetics when really these details should be, well, invisible.
A Breath Away emerges in the midst of a growing number of films dedicated to portraying the horrors of environmental disaster. Timely as it is horrifying, A Breath Away is an emotionally-charged thriller that broadly follows the algorithmic pattern set by previous disaster films, and has little to say ideologically about its central issues.
