By: Trevor Chartrand You’ll be hard pressed to find a more Canadian film than The Grizzlies; the inspiring true story of an impoverished Nunavut community battling mental illness by creating a sports team. Over ten years in the making, this long-time passion project of director Miranda de Pencier is a not only a well-made dramatic film, but also a small taste of the type of media representation First Nations and Inuit citizens deserve.
Curiosity is a quality that keeps on giving. M. Night Shyamalan, for instance, is a filmmaker who is eager to explore his own craft. And while his back catalogue has included projects that have snowballed out of his own range, he’s at least owning his ambition and finding original stories to tell audiences. His latest collaborations with indie empire Blumhouse Productions have been great vehicles to anchor his passion projects and visual filmmaking. Such is…
Hellmington centres on Detective Samantha Woodhouse, distressed over the recent death of her father and tormented by a forgotten yet mysterious case of the disappearance of a former high school classmate. In order to piece together the puzzle of the latter, Samantha reconnects with her past while she’s in town for the funeral; including meeting old acquaintances and people who were close to her late dad.
By: Jolie Featherstone Director Neil Marshall (The Descent) brings his signature blend of murky macabre and blood-soaked adrenaline to Hellboy, the latest cinematic incarnation of the beloved Dark Horse graphic novel series. Starring David Harbour of Stranger Things fame as the titular anti-hero and Milla Jovovich as Nimue (also known as the Blood Queen), Marshall’s Hellboy is a genre-bending departure from the earlier screen adaptations directed by Guillermo Del Toro. This installment does not call…
The Brink should be a more controversial movie than it is. For a little over 90 minutes, audiences closely observe Steve Bannon, former chairman of right-wing news outlet Breitbart News and former chief strategist for President Donald Trump. Isn’t it insane for Bannon, a highly criticized public figure, to volunteer himself to be the subject of a documentary?
Earlier this week, the ALMA Observatory photographed “the first direct image of a black hole”. The picture glowingly pulsates if you stare at it for too long – it’s actually quite marvellous. What the ALMA Observatory may not know is that I had seen a star collapse the night before – a walking black hole, if you will, portrayed by Elisabeth Moss (The One I Love, Us).
The struggle of the Yazidi people against ISIS is a noteworthy story and one deserving of a sympathetic and heroic cinematic adaptation. Unfortunately, Eva Husson’s Girls of the Sun is just not it. While the film is serviceable, its relationship to its subject matter is somehow mundane and exploitative at the same time.
By: Trevor Chartrand Animation studio Laika Entertainment has a reputation for dark and brooding content with releases like Corpse Bride (2005) or Coraline (2009), but this year’s Missing Link breaks their mold as a fun-for-most-ages adventure story.
Gary Burns’ Man Running, which modestly premiered at the 2018 Whistler Film Festival, follows Jim (Gord Rand) as he participates in a 24-hour marathon. The laborious journey he takes is vertiginously interspersed with flashbacks and hallucinations, suggesting a double struggle for the main character: one physical, one emotional.
