By: Addison Wylie Sneaking in under the radar during this year’s final quarter is an uplifting family film called The Games Maker. For those who take a chance on it, they’ll be as pleasantly surprised as I was when Juan Pablo Buscarini’s film pulled me into a wonderful world of old-fashioned strategy. I say “pleasantly surprised” because the marketing for The Games Maker drives home its whimsy and fantastical elements a little too hard; so much…
By: Addison Wylie Kahlil Joseph’s Arcade Fire docu-mishmash titled The Reflektor Tapes is like a fever dream with great music that has gotten too carried away with itself. I imagine if I listened to the band’s discography and then crashed after a hard day’s work, I would start to visualize this film’s lurid activity. The Reflektor Tapes is one of these examples where you can’t stop fans from flocking to this thing, and newcomers will…
By: Addison Wylie The music in Mavis! wins us over in a flash. I wouldn’t be surprised if filmmaker Jessica Edwards was actually tempted early on to make a straight concert film instead of a biographical documentary. Mavis! is much more than the gospel music that enraptured listeners; including musicians Bonnie Raitt, Chuck D, Bob Dylan, and recent collaborator Jeff Tweedy (of Wilco). The film is about Mavis Staples, the legendary singer behind a voice that…
By: Shahbaz Khayambashi Kilo Two Bravo may have surprised me, but Paul Katis’ film would have ultimately been better if it ditched the first and third acts. There is nothing new about the setup of this film: it is yet another bit of neo-white man’s burden propaganda which shows the importance of war while almost completely erasing the local victims of the aggression. It is only in the second act that the film finds its bearings – turning…
By: Addison Wylie The award for this year’s most awkward movie goes to Rick Alverson’s Entertainment, a film rooted in morose career purgatory. Now, the last time I used the term “career purgatory”, it was when I reviewed Lenny Abrahamson’s delightful Frank. Frank presented the argument that an artist stuck in a creative rut isn’t necessarily the end of the world. Entertainment proposes a sardonic rebuttal with a comedian (played by real-life alternative comic Gregg Turkington)…
By: Addison Wylie Camp Takota and Bad Night are movies that unassumingly and depthlessly grant access to today’s YouTube-addled youth through celebrity appeal. To my recollection, Smosh: The Movie is the first film to actually submerge itself in YouTube culture and say interesting things about how we perceive online content. There are also jokes involving a microphone being shoved up a bum and a love interest nicknamed “Butt Massage Girl”. Ass jokes and modern philosophy – the film is colonophical. As…
By: Shahbaz Khayambashi The Winnipeg-based Astron-6 film collective has made a career out of churning out 1980s-inspired pastiches, so it was only a matter of time before they gave giallo – the Italian horror subgenre that is equal parts noir and splatter – their treatment with The Editor. Here, the hero is a film editor with a tragic past who makes a living editing exploitation films. As he edits the film-within-a-film, life imitates art and several of…
By: Addison Wylie As much as I would like to commend writer/director Jeremy Thomas for making a sophisticated and adult film about grief and the internal struggle to define what is morally correct, his woeful feature Ally Was Screaming is an anticlimactic and overcooked blunder that drove me crazy. Although, Thomas’ maturity is essentially what was much needed in January’s I Put a Hit on You. Seth, Nole, and Ally were a friendly and tender trifecta….
By: Addison Wylie Bad Night is that sleepy student who draws open eyes on their eyelids to convince you that they’re interested. But, if you were to poke them, they would fall backwards like a flimsy stage flat – likewise for this detatched action/comedy starring YouTube stars Lauren Elizabeth Luthringshausen and Jenn McAllister (aka. Jennxpenn). The film has been brought to us by Chris and Nick Riedell – the directorial coupling who also brought us Camp…
By: Addison Wylie Around the time Patrick Brice’s sex comedy The Overnight hit theatres, movie goers were also presented with the filmmaker’s take on the horror behind obsession and abandonment in his seedy DIY flick called Creep. Creep is told from the perspective of Aaron, a videographer who is rolling lots of tape because he’s been told to. Aaron has answered a Craigslist ad posted by someone who was in need of a cameraman to document a personal…