Leading the Canadian Screen Awards with 14 nominations, Brother is an enthralling family drama that’s well realized by Lie With Me director Clement Virgo. Though comparisons to 2016’s Oscar winner Moonlight and 2019’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco are inevitable given the coming-of-age material and how a family’s dynamic is examined during a sprawling time frame, Brother still stands out as a true Canadian original.
The Quiet Girl appears to tell a simple story about a young girl, Cáit (newcomer Catherine Clinch, who shows incredible range in her brilliant and award-winning acting debut). She’s relocated to live with foster parents for a Summer to relieve the tension in her household. The house she moves to temporarily is owned by a sweet, older couple (Carrie Crowley, Andrew Bennett), and Cáit is almost immediately met with nurturing support. Following an expected trope in…
By: Trevor Chartrand Quirky and surreal, Adult Adoption is the bizarrely unique directorial feature film debut from Karen Knox (star of Letters to Satan Claus). The movie explores its characters with a delicate balance of intrusive empathy, and Knox’s filmmaking is executed in such an uncomfortable way that viewers may feel like they’re trespassing on the intimate details of a person’s private life.
I Like Movies, a coming-of-age dramedy set in the early-2000s, alternates between the double life of 17-year-old Burlington native Lawrence Kweller (Isiah Lehtinen): an outspoken high school senior and an obsessive film buff at his local video store, Sequels Video, who is simply trying to fit in. 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…
A coming-of-age story centring around an adult’s personal issues with their adoption would be really interesting and, quite frankly, a cathartic outlet for those viewers who share similar feelings. Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul is very close to pulling off this type of character study, but it doesn’t quite go as far as it can with this premise.
Alice, Darling gives audiences just enough insight into its character driven piece for it to be emotionally moving. The emphasis is only there because I also feel like the movie is missing its first act.
When You Finish Saving the World is about human connectivity and how big personalities are interpreted through alternative perspectives. It checks out that these elements are featured in Jesse Eisenberg’s directorial debut, an Oscar nominated performer who seems to be attracted to these themes when reflecting on his previous work.
By: Liam Parker Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, a 90% dialogue-free, Polish film whose protagonist is a donkey, is one of the most interesting films of 2022. The movie, named after its donkey, centres itself on the melancholic ex-circus animal as he travels the continent of Europe; witnessing the worst and best sides of human nature and chronicling a microcosm of modern European life along the way.
