By: Liam Parker Nostalgia in cinema is a fickle thing. If done right, it can invoke memories of a forgotten time; sparking comforting feelings in those that lived through it and sparking interest in those who didn’t. Done wrong however, and it can feel like the film is just rehashing old material – like your drunk uncle telling you the same jokes you read in a dog-eared joke book from your elementary school library. While…
Horror-comedy Here For Blood features Shawn Roberts (of the Resident Evil franchise) as Tom O’Bannon, an all-around good guy who has a solid reputation in the world of wrestling and only shows a smidge of an attitude when his girlfriend Phoebe (Joelle Farrow) asks him to babysit a 10-year-old for a few hours while she prepares for college exams. The kid, Grace (Maya Misaljevic), is stubborn at first, but warms up to Tom over some…
Deadstream is a fantastic horror-comedy that takes a questionable aesthetic and premise, and creates lots of scares and laughs through its innovation.
Clerks III features writer/director Kevin Smith “returning to the well” to follow up with everyone’s favourite perturbed convenience store employees, Dante and Randal.
Set in the theatre district of London’s West End in 1953, a production of Agatha Christie’s whodunit The Mousetrap seems to be cursed after the body of flagrant director Leo Kopernick (Adrien Brody) turns up dead after the show. The jaded Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and rookie investigator Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan) are assigned to the case, and it seems as if everyone’s a suspect: the actors, the crew, the waiting staff and, to Stalker’s…
Set in the early-2000s, I Like Movies alternates between the double life of 17-year-old Burlington native Lawrence Kweller (Isiah Lehtinen) as an outspoken high school senior and an obsessive film buff at his local video store, Sequels Video. Lawrence is an opinionated know-it-all under both roofs, but he feels more in his element at Sequels and is elated when they finally hire him on as an employee.
As rude and unappealing Funny Pages can be, it’s a brutally honest and funny character study of a young artist who channels trauma and grief into his aspirations to be a successful cartoonist. A true tale of an unlikely opportunist.
The Good Boss offers a mannered approach to the self-destructive character study; separating it from similar company pitched in a much more frantic, anxiety-inducing tone (Nose to Tail, Uncut Gems).
I can’t remember that last time I wanted to grab the reigns of a movie as badly as I did while watching Sharp Stick, Lena Dunham’s return to directing self-written material since her acclaimed HBO series Girls. With this latest endeavour, Dunham is heading in a good direction with interesting and peculiar characters and then, two-thirds through the movie, Sharp Stick takes a hard turn into another character arc that seems like an unfair trade-off…
By: Jeff Ching Despite the title, Vengeance is really not a revenge movie (though revenge is part of the plot), and it’s especially not an action movie. Actually, it’s much better and smarter than what you’d expect. It’s a very ambitious film that attempts many things: it’s a fish-out-of-water comedy with a dark sense of humour, a murder mystery, it’s satirical, it’s philosophical. The movie has a lot to say about the current state of America…