Festival Coverage

Festival Coverage

Canadian Film Fest 2025: ‘Gold Bars: Who the F*ck Is Uncle Ludwig?’

Surly lawyer Glenn “Joseph” Feldman is certain that a former business partner was profiting from a hidden stash of stolen Nazi gold.  In fact, Joseph’s infamous conviction becomes detrimental to his career and personal life, and has brought on a defamation lawsuit against him by his old friend.  His skeptical and inquisitive daughter, Alex, wants to help bring closure to this chapter with some tough love and some outsider expertise. Billie Mintz’s documentary looks slick…

Festival Coverage

Canadian Film Fest 2025: ‘Vampire Zombies…from Space!’

Vampire Zombies…from Space!: if you think that title tries hard to impress the audience, wait ’til you see the movie! Vampire Zombies…from Space! aims to be a pastiche of black-and-white creature features of the 1950s. Director Michael Stasko (co-writting with Alex Forman) nails the visual attributes of this era, yet always remembers that he’s making a cornball comedy. The best jokes in Stasko’s film are the gags that don’t necessarily satirize the genre or the period,…

Festival Coverage

Hot Docs 2024: ‘My Dad’s Tapes’

Ever since the the death of Leonard Watson in 2006, aspiring filmmaker Kurtis Watson has struggled to find closure and understand his Dad’s decision to commit suicide.  It’s been an upsetting topic for his family, who are either still grieving or are more in the dark than Kurtis about the tragedy.

Festival Coverage

Canadian Film Fest ’24: Daughter of the Sun

When I wrote about Ryan Ward’s directorial feature debut Son of the Sunshine, I was humbled by the filmmaker’s response to my unenthused review.  I had labeled his film as “maple syrup melancholy”, a term I coined to encompass Canada’s ongoing trend of churning out depressing, empty movies.  I thought the term was clever, Ward didn’t think so.  The Canadian writer/director advised that, while disliking a movie and its motives is fine, labelling art can…

Festival Coverage

Blood in the Snow 2023: ‘The Hyperborean’

The Hyperborean has been written and directed by filmmakers who have been serving a 10-year sentence in my personal “movie jail” since being responsible for the gross-out body horror Septic Man.  After missing their recent collaborations, director Jesse Thomas Cook and screenwriter Tony Burgess have appeared on my radar with their latest sci-fi mashup The Hyperborean and, thankfully, it’s pretty good.

Festival Coverage

Toronto After Dark 2023: Shorts After Dark

The short films featured at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival are always worth a watch.  The selections hardly miss, and audiences are usually given a wide collection of different types of horror told from diverse perspectives.  The shorts I did catch at this year’s film festival were consistent with the past, but also included some all-timer scares and laughs.