After Yang chronicles the in-between of a family tragedy. Set in the not-so-distant future (similar to Spike Jonze’s Her), an assistive android named Yang (Justin H. Min, in one of this year’s strongest supporting roles) suddenly malfunctions. Yang’s assigned family are shaken up as they grasp for an action plan. The search for a satisfying resolution falls on the father, Jake (Colin Farrell), who slowly discovers more of Yang’s purpose as he shops around for repair…
Filmmaker Sean Baker follows up his American masterpiece The Florida Project, a drama about a helpless community living on the fringe of fantasy, with Red Rocket, another winner that dabbles in the same wheelhouse but broadening its scope to a rural population. And much like how The Florida Project found humour in innocence, Red Rocket finds humour in ignorance.
By: Jolie Featherstone By beautifully capturing the stories of American communities that are rarely seen on screen, Sean Baker has the makings of a modern auteur.
The Humans is the type of movie that makes you want to jump through the screen. Not because the film has transported you and swallowed you up, but rather because you want a better seat and you want to tell everyone to speak up.
Zola, to an extent, is experimental with its narrative. While it flows coherently, the film is very much still in tune with its source material – a series of tweets explaining a story that’s “strange yet true” – and presents itself as someone spinning you a wild yarn (intercut with tangents and outbursts).
In Minari, a Korean family travels from California to build a new homestead in Arkansas; in hopes that they’ll be able to create a farm and make a decent living selling their culture’s food to local markets. This premise, however, is merely a clothesline for writer/director Lee Isaac Chung to hang up different moments in this family’s life that will, eventually, piece together their memories and future.
A story of possible infidelity gets an anti-Hollywood spin in Sofia Coppola’s sophisticated dramedy On the Rocks.
After wowing audiences with his feature-length debut The Witch, writer/director Robert Eggers takes a big swing with The Lighthouse – a film with more specifications and fewer actors. His latest film connected with many (our own Shahbaz Khayambashi loved it at TIFF), but it didn’t work for me. I can appreciate the dedication of Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe (which translates into their memorable performances), but the actors are wasted on a movie that’s too muddled…
“This makes me want to puke. Sorry, this came into my head. Sorry.” These were the words spoken by Robert Eggers, before he made a point about the relationship between Andrej Tarkovsky and Fyodor Dostoevsky. The singular voice behind the instant classic The Witch and The Lighthouse provided evidence of two important parts of his personality: the first being his self-effacing tendencies despite how well-read he is—after all, any great artist is first a great student—and…
