Latest

Canada

Reviews

The Kid Detective

The Kid Detective has done the best job, in recent memory, explaining why a mystery’s leading sleuth is such a sad sack.  The enigmatic and eccentric personality has become such a cliché in the genre, that the audience just expects and accepts the detective to be grizzled, or unhappy, or an unpredictable hot head.  In The Kid Detective, Abe Applebaum (Adam Brody) carries those traits, but writer/director Evan Morgan provides compelling motivation which fuels Brody’s top-form…

Reviews

The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open

Walking home on a dreary day in Vancouver, Áila (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers) finds herself in the middle of an altercation between a surly man and a meek Indigenous woman.  The woman, Rosie (Violet Nelson), has been roughed up.  With instinctual grace and with Rosie’s permission, Áila steps in and separates Rosie from this argument, and invites the stranger into her house for safety and comfort.

Reviews

Brotherhood

By: Trevor Chartrand Based on a true story, Brotherhood is a harrowing tale of survival that recounts the tragedy beset upon a boy’s summer camp in Balsam Lake, Ontario in 1926.  On the night of July 20, thirteen boys and two camp counsellors set out to cross the lake in a canoe to gather food and supplies for the camp.  They encountered high winds that capsized the boat, leaving them floating in the cold water…

Reviews

Stand!

Somewhere during the making of this film adaptation of Danny Schur and Rick Chafe’s period musical Stand!, the project was seriously mishandled.  Robert Adetuyi’s film version sounds like it should be on stage and looks as if it was written and shot for daytime television.

Reviews

Astronaut

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.

Reviews

Mouthpiece

In Mouthpiece, two women play the lead character.  Not with strategic editing or a duel Sliding Doors-esque narrative, but simultaneously on-screen.  While this may sound like an excuse for the filmmakers to showboat and earn arthouse cred, the results couldn’t be farther from being just a fancy trick.

Reviews

This Is North Preston

This Is North Preston is a spinning top.  One moment, you’ll have your mind made up about what the documentary is presenting only to have your opinion changed a few more times.  I was so gobsmacked by the end that I was almost inclined to rewatch the film to see if my opinion would change again – I dare you to find a more riveting documentary than this.