Fresh Off Markham is a narrative collective between budding filmmakers Trevor Choi, Cyrus Lo and Kurt Yuen, and it’s a big swing to tell a story of small crime. The movie endures some bumps and bruises as it struggles to maintain a consistent tone while juggling too many character arcs, but this unpredictability also strings along the audience’s curiousity. He Li and Nian Chang portray Chinese immigrants who, having settled in the melting pot of…
In between shows, two titans tower over stage performer Shelly (Pamela Anderson) – statues of glamourous, golden age showgirls that represent the Las Vegas staple, Le Razzle Dazzle, that Shelly has built a career around. These idols may identify personally to Shelly, but she soon realizes they mean very little to most people; including younger dancers she shares the stage with (Kiernan Shipka, Brenda Song) and the wayward daughter (Booksmart’s Billie Lourd) she has disassociated with to chase…
By: Addison Wylie The Room Next Door is headlined by Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton) and Julianne Moore (Being Alice), performing under the direction of Spanish filmmaker/screenwriter Pedro Almodóvar (Talk to Her). While this drama feels like an easy task for these Oscar winners, that’s essentially the magic of the film and what makes The Room Next Door effortlessly great. For the Parallel Mothers filmmaker, Almodóvar makes his English-language debut with The Room Next Door; though the audience wouldn’t have noticed. Aside…
By: Addison Wylie Preceding an amicable exchange between ex-lovers, Andy Goodrich (Michael Keaton) is asked by his former wife Ann (Andie MacDowell) how he’s doing. “I’m okay,” Andy answers. “You’re always okay,” Ann teases. She isn’t wrong. Throughout Goodrich, the audience observes Andy doing okay. He occasionally has an awkward conversation that sometimes references his past as a flawed father but, otherwise, he’s a well-respected and levelheaded dude.
The assumption to presume there’s a personal connection between director Ellen Kuras and photographer Lee Miller, the subject of Kuras’ feature-length narrative debut Lee, isn’t that rash. An obvious interest for camerawork is shared between Kuras and Miller, and the passion for the craft may have also rubbed off on star Kate Winslet (who Kuras has worked with previously on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and A Little Chaos, and is credited as an executive producer on Lee). …
Invoking comparisons to Mass and Our Friend, His Three Daughters may not be as good as those character-driven dramas, but it’s still a fantastic chamber piece that should spark award buzz around its stripped-down cast.
Caligula: The Ultimate Cut is deservedly being treated as an event. This restoration of the provocative 1980 swords-and-sandals historical drama is currently being screened in 4K Ultra High Definition at select theatres as part of an exclusive roadshow. The movie is the epitome of a re-imagining; a perfected cut that scraps all of the footage from the box office hit in exchange for a shot list of different angles and takes, as well as using…
Reagan is such a conservatively-made movie that it would almost be pointless to go after the film for its politics. Revered to most as the first conservative president of the United States of America, Ronald Reagan’s presidency was a touchstone of the 80’s and there’s no denying how deep his political influence ran afterwards.
By: Trevor Chartrand The notoriously quirky Jason Schwartzman (The Overnight) stars in Between the Temples as – brace yourself – an odd-ball character. Shocking, right? In all seriousness though, Nathan Silver’s offbeat film does ultimately prove to be a relatively serviceable, if tired, indie-style dramedy. To the movie’s credit, Silver explores an otherwise formulaic narrative with a character-focused vulnerability that truly enhances the material.
