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Paying For It

February 5, 2025Addison Wylie0 Comments

Last seen on screen in Close To You but more famous for her groundbreaking performance in John Cameron Mitchell’s sexually charged Shortbus, Sook-Yin Lee tries to match Mitchell’s knack for tender confrontations with her directorial effort Paying For It. The Shortbus filmmaker must approve. After all, Mitchell serves as an executive producer on this adult flick. The inspiration for Paying For It also comes from Chester Brown’s graphic novel that Lee is adapting, which drew inspiration from Lee and Brown’s real-life…

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I’m Still Here

February 2, 2025Addison Wylie0 Comments

Fernanda Torres is an Oscar front-runner for Best Actress, after winning the Golden Globe for her sensational performance in the epic drama I’m Still Here – the buzz is well-earned. Despite the movie being too long while also rushing through the last period in this devastating story, I’m Still Here is a very strong movie about the emotional endurance of love. Torres plays Eunice Paiva, the mother of a large family who are trying to live under strict…

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Hard Truths

January 27, 2025Addison Wylie0 Comments

Take one of Tyler Perry’s earlier melodramas, use the same bundling the filmmaker/playwright uses when trying to tell multiple stories, give Madea some heart-wrenching secrets, and her husband Joe some internal conflict. That well-adjusted flick would be the closest comparison to Hard Truths, a memorable tragicomedy from writer/director Mike Leigh (Naked, Happy-Go-Lucky, Mr. Turner). Leigh’s character-driven story is centred around a black-Caribbean family in London. While trying to make ends meet, they’re constantly reminded of their failures…

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Curl Power

January 26, 2025Addison Wylie0 Comments

By: Addison Wylie Last Summer, audiences were treated to the Canadian coming-of-age sports drama Backspot. Despite functioning at a glossy sitcom level, the indie was still a sufficient way to address serious topics for teens such as anxieties, competition, and family conflicts. Curl Power covers similar topics only, this time, their packaged as a documentary. Curl Power is a superior movie and an inspiration for teens (notably high schoolers) enduring the same issues expressed in Josephine Anderson doc, but…

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Fresh Off Markham

January 21, 2025Addison Wylie0 Comments

Fresh Off Markham is a narrative collective between budding filmmakers Trevor Choi, Cyrus Lo and Kurt Yuen, and it’s a big swing to tell a story of small crime. The movie endures some bumps and bruises as it struggles to maintain a consistent tone while juggling too many character arcs, but this unpredictability also strings along the audience’s curiousity. He Li and Nian Chang portray Chinese immigrants who, having settled in the melting pot of…

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The Last Showgirl

January 20, 2025Addison Wylie0 Comments

In between shows, two titans tower over stage performer Shelly (Pamela Anderson) – statues of glamourous, golden age showgirls that represent the Las Vegas staple, Le Razzle Dazzle, that Shelly has built a career around. These idols may identify personally to Shelly, but she soon realizes they mean very little to most people; including younger dancers she shares the stage with (Kiernan Shipka, Brenda Song) and the wayward daughter (Booksmart’s Billie Lourd) she has disassociated with to chase…

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Young Werther

January 15, 2025Addison Wylie0 Comments

Young Werther is a witless comedy, which is awkward considering the production deems itself as a slick flick. While I can’t comment on whether Jose Lourenço’s feature-length filmmaking debut is faithful to its source material (the 1774 novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther” by Johann Wolfgang Goethe), I can relay to my readers what Young Werther reminded me of. Werther (Douglas Booth of Netflix’s The Dirt), someone who considers himself  to be a noble cosmopolitan and…

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The Room Next Door

January 13, 2025Addison Wylie0 Comments

By: Addison Wylie The Room Next Door is headlined by Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton) and Julianne Moore (Being Alice), performing under the direction of Spanish filmmaker/screenwriter Pedro Almodóvar (Talk to Her). While this drama feels like an easy task for these Oscar winners, that’s essentially the magic of the film and what makes The Room Next Door effortlessly great. For the Parallel Mothers filmmaker, Almodóvar makes his English-language debut with The Room Next Door; though the audience wouldn’t have noticed. Aside…

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Christmas Eve In Miller’s Point

December 22, 2024Addison Wylie0 Comments

The expectations for contemporary holiday movies is to push feel-good stories that either include a slew of cliched character archetypes (“the busy business woman”, “the hunky but humble woodsman”) or include as many identifiable symbols to represent the season. We see the latter in movies that are casual about Christmas – make a normal, low stakes schmaltz-fest and include a wreath in the background for some shots. Christmas Eve In Miller’s Point is refreshingly different….

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The End

December 19, 2024Addison Wylie0 Comments

By: Addison Wylie After being lauded for his work as a documentarian on The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, I suppose Joshua Oppenheimer was itching to cash in some clout; deciding to do so with an apocalyptic musical titled The End. Sporting impressive art direction and a well-regarded cast including Tilda Swinton (I’m Not Here), Michael Shannon (The Night Before) and George MacKay (1917), Oppenheimer fuses components of a survival thriller, a dynasty drama, and…

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