By: Jessica Goddard From directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (The Way Way Back), Downhill is an English-language remake of Ruben Östlund’s European awards contender Force Majeure (2014). Having not seen the original, I can only speak to the quality of the new film – starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell – as a standalone film. And, it’s not bad! Truly, it’s not bad. It’s a little simple and unpolished, and uncertain of what it wants to…
By: Jessica Goddard The day after I saw this movie, I got an ad for it on Facebook. According to the post promoted on my timeline, Time Out New York had given Kitty Green’s The Assistant five stars, and called it a “flawless thriller.” I can’t disagree that The Assistant is a good, worthwhile movie, but calling it a thriller is a stretch. Especially when what makes it work so well is its very objective,…
By: Trevor Chartrand While epic in scale with an ambitious, decade-spanning story, The Traitor is ultimately a disappointing, bloated film. This movie sets out to tell the gritty true story of the Italian mafia’s first police informant, Tommaso Buscetta (Pierfrancesco Favino), however, this lengthy picture gets bogged down with an overstuffed plot. Even with such rich and captivating source material, the film is ultimately uninteresting due to its failure to satisfy in the ‘audience accessibility’ category.
As 2019’s awards season comes to a close with the upcoming Oscars ceremony on February 9, the critics at Wylie Writes would like to shine a spotlight on the movies they thought were the very best of the year – including some festival favourites that will receive wider releases this year.
By: Trevor Chartrand Director Gille Klabin hits a surprising home run with The Wave, a fast-paced, drug-fueled, comedy/thriller with an unexpectedly cathartic conclusion. It’s a film rich in tone and atmosphere, similar to the time-slipping (500) Days of Summer or even Tim Burton’s whimsical Big Fish. The movie is set in an enriched, highly-detailed world that would require multiple viewings to discover each layer of creative foreshadowing, and each hidden easter egg.
By: Trevor Chartrand Based on a true story, Brotherhood is a harrowing tale of survival that recounts the tragedy beset upon a boy’s summer camp in Balsam Lake, Ontario in 1926. On the night of July 20, thirteen boys and two camp counsellors set out to cross the lake in a canoe to gather food and supplies for the camp. They encountered high winds that capsized the boat, leaving them floating in the cold water…
By: Jolie Featherstone Director Rian Johnson (Looper, Star Wars: Episode XIII – The Last Jedi) makes a triumphant return to his whodunnit-loving form with Knives Out. Fourteen years after his much-loved debut feature, Brick, a passionately-told film noir set in a modern-day Southern California high school, Johnson’s Knives Out charmed audiences with one of the most talked-about films at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
By: Jessica Goddard At the Marriage Story screening I attended, a complimentary packet of tissues was waiting in the cup holder of each seat in the theatre. Quite the statement. So when the movie opens with both leading characters reading the lists of things they like about one another in front of a mediator, you know this will be a wrenching watch.
By: Jessica Goddard Margaret Atwood is fairly low-hanging fruit as far as documentary subjects go. At the moment, it’s almost certain she’s Canada’s most recognized, beloved author, and her latest novel, The Testaments, came out in September and is a sequel to her best-known work, The Handmaid’s Tale.
By: Jessica Goddard Full disclosure: I am bad at watching war movies. I watch war movies out of some (likely misdirected) sense of duty – if actual human beings lived these horrors, I should be able to stomach cinematic recreations of them, is my thinking. But, I find it very hard to watch people die (which I’ve chosen to attribute to a smug overabundance of empathy) even if it’s only a performance. For this reason,…