Jesse O’Brien’s horror/comedy Two Heads Creek aims to tackle the swelling issue of racism and nationalism in Australia and the United Kingdom through the most unusual of means: cannibalism. Though it’s hard not to appreciate the attempt, Two Heads Creek’s absurd premise often overtakes the seriousness of the threat posed by racism and nationalism.
The Rest of Us needs a low triple-digit runtime, but sets up a needless challenge for itself to tell its story in under 80 minutes. What’s the hurry? And if filmmaker Aisling Chin-Yee has to compromise the narrative with condensed scenes and sharp edits to win the challenge, what’s the point?
There is nothing charming, insightful, or engaging about The Departure, writer/director Merland Hoxha’s first foray into feature-ish length cinema (the total runtime is just a little over an hour).
Jeffrey McHale’s documentary You Don’t Nomi dissects 1995’s much maligned racy drama Showgirls in a similar way that Rodney Aster’s Room 237 delved into different theories on Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining. Both films are about how cult interest breathed new life into a filmmaker’s original vision, however the difference between the documentaries stems from their points of interest. Room 237 was about how movie goers have interpreted visual totems within the film. You…
By: Trevor Chartrand A plain and passable thriller, The Postcard Killings is stamped with mild mystery and timid intrigue that ultimately doesn’t deliver a whole lot of punch.
By: Jolie Featherstone If Alice in Wonderland was a tarot card, its inverse would be The Dinner Party.
If you like filmmaker Elia Suleiman, you will like It Must Be Heaven. This may well be an unusual start to a review, but this is not meant for the fans, because they already know what they are getting into. For the rest of you, how would one go about describing a Suleiman film? Well, Suleiman is a rare filmmaker: he is a Palestinian who is less concerned with doom and gloom, preferring to speak…
This doesn’t happen too often – two films of the same specific sub-genre being released so closely to each other. In this case, the genre is the “home invasion thriller”. One’s really good, the other is really bad. Becky, the really good one, did a great job entertaining audiences with lots of inventive action. Its comparable evil twin, Survive the Night, takes us to the upside-down. It’s boring, illogical and its most famous star, Bruce…
You have two choices: focus on what’s insufficient in Becky or praise what the production miraculously pulls off. I would rather lean more towards the latter than the former. Sure, there are details in Becky that I wish had more time to breathe. On the other hand, the film is very entertaining, and it’s a career high for one of its actors.
