The Front Room
While a filmmaker who commits to their premise is usually worth commending, The Front Room repels the viewer towards condemning it.
Family
His Three Daughters
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.
IF
John Krasinski may still be in an early chapter as a filmmaker, but he’s already carving out a nice reputation for having a fantastic knack for fantasy. With A Quiet Place, he was able to create a sensory-deprived moviegoing experience as a distraction to explore the bounds of his fantastical horror. In his latest film IF, a much more family-friendly vehicle, Krasinski has fun with the boundless limits of the imagination.
Orion and the Dark
Netflix’s animated Orion and the Dark may not be the streamer’s most memorable family film, and it isn’t one of the strongest adaptations of a children’s book, but its imagination can’t be ignored.
Family Switch
The only real positive takeaway from Netflix’s dreadful yuletide family comedy Family Switch, other than the odd mild chuckle, is that it acts as a canary in the coal mine for body swap flicks.
Butterfly Tale
Finding a nice balance between fun and learning, Butterfly Tale chronicles the animated adventure of a flutter of monarch butterflies as they migrate to Mexico.
TIFF 2023: ‘Seagrass’
In Seagrass, writer/director Meredith Hama-Brown uses a tired-and-true formula of the “family getaway” to uncover new wrinkles in an, otherwise, ordinary unit.
Wylie Writes’ Two-On-One with Dominique Jolin and Raymond Lebrun
While the troublemaking cat-and-mouse duo Tom and Jerry run amok in the United States, their opposite (and far removed) distant cousins of the North, a confident mouse named Toopy and a mute kitty named Binoo, are teaching children wholesome lessons and having lighthearted fun.