By: Trevor Chartrand Danish filmmaker/journalist Mads Brügger hits an incredible home run with his latest intense and heartbreaking documentary, Cold Case Hammarskjöld. The film sets out to explore a fifty-year-old unsolved mystery, which is intriguing enough, only to end up unravelling a much larger, gut-churningly appalling conspiracy.
What do you do when you live in an age of renewed Trumpian nuclear anxiety and wish to express the doomed future of the youth therein? If you’re William Scoular, you make Survival Box, a film so navel-gazing in its execution that, by the end of its runtime, it can only be described as an answer to a question no one asked.
By: Jessica Goddard Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is a halfway decent horror movie. However, those who grew up disconcertingly obsessed with the creepiness and morbidity of the anthologies this film is based on will be disappointed.
Just as a thoughtful retirement video or an in memoriam can do, Avi Belkin’s well produced outside-the-box doc Mike Wallace Is Here encapsulates its subject’s career and tells a personal story through archival footage.
It’s embarrassing to admit, but A Wizard’s Tale – a film intended for small children – took me a while to finish. The storytelling, so hyper. The humour, so random. And no matter how many times I rewatched pivotal parts, I was still left dumbfounded. When our heroes reached a kingdom of “balloon-people”, I knew I wasn’t losing it – the movie was.
A rising writer of a Palestinian soap opera tries to cater to everyone, while covering up his own secret, in Sameh Zoabi’s award-winning comedy Tel Aviv on Fire.
Free Trip to Egypt is the epitome of a “feel-good movie”. The fact that it’s also a documentary is proof that positive affirmations can manifest organically.
Most people unacquainted with pro surfer Bethany Hamilton (myself included) may only know about her dangerous run-in with a tiger shark, which resulted in her left arm being bitten off (a story adapted in 2011’s Soul Surfer, based on Hamilton’s autobiographical best-seller). I wholeheartedly recommend Bethany Hamilton: Unstoppable to those movie goers. Not only does Aaron Lieber’s documentary fill us in on Hamilton’s career using stylistic flare, but the film does an exceptional job showcasing…
One of the best things about moviegoing is watching a rising star come into their own element. Up-and-coming actors are always praised for this, but we don’t shed enough light on indie filmmakers who finally find the right vehicle for them.
Sending the unlikeliest of people into space–from Jason Voorhees to Homer Simpson–has always been a crowd-pleasing move. So it should come as no surprise that Shelagh McLeod finds the same results in her feature directorial debut Astronaut, which sends seventy-one year old Richard Dreyfuss into the heavens, in perhaps the Oscar winner’s best performance in years.