Eddie Mensore’s environmental thriller Mine 9 is a succinct depiction of trapped coal miners in Appalachia. Coming at a time when the preservation of the coal mining industry is improbably and invariably debated, thanks to a political climate incapable of addressing an alternative to fossil fuels, Mine 9 satisfyingly addresses worker’s safety, while interrogating large corporations who allow fatal accidents like this to happen.
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.
The synopsis of Blackbear vaguely reminds one of the 2006 film Annapolis–a film that, if you recall (and if so, good for you), was marketed as a recruit training film in the vein of A Gentleman and an Officer, but was actually, secretly, a boxing film. Blackbear is similar: it starts off as a war film, with the two central characters as captives by ISIS, only to quickly become a boxing film within the film’s…
Gary Burns’ Man Running, which modestly premiered at the 2018 Whistler Film Festival, follows Jim (Gord Rand) as he participates in a 24-hour marathon. The laborious journey he takes is vertiginously interspersed with flashbacks and hallucinations, suggesting a double struggle for the main character: one physical, one emotional.
Finding Hygge explores the Danish concept of hygge, which a quick Google search tells me has to do with comfort, wellness, and happiness. I was forced to Google, because at no point in this ninety-minute long documentary is the concept distilled or defined in a coherent manner.
Searching for Ingmar Bergman, a new documentary from renowned German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta, is an intimate portrait of the famed Swedish filmmaker’s life and legacy, focusing both on his voluminous oeuvre (Bergman’s first film credit as a screenwriter in the early 1940s to his last film, Saraband, in 2004) and his family life.
Number 37, which recently premiered this summer at the Fantasia Festival, proves an old argument: some films should not be remade. In this case, director Nosipho Dumisa has updated and resituated Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller Rear Window within the generic contours of the gangster sub-genre.
Jude S. Walko makes his directorial feature debut with the haunted castle horror flick The Incantation, which falls short in providing the scares.
Jamie Adams’ Alright Now, a romantic dramedy following a rock star following a particularly brutal double breakup, boasts that it is completely improvised. Here’s the funny thing about improvisation: you need actors who are good at it.
The central character in Dave Schwep’s Broken Star is a young actress fallen from grace: a drug-addicted, manipulative monster. Markey Marlowe (Crazy, Stupid, Love’s Analeigh Tipton) – a character and name that sounds like it’s come right out of a 1940s film noir – is placed on house arrest, with her only company being reclusive landlord Daryl (Tyler Labine of Mountain Men), whose grandmother has recently passed away. Over time, Marlowe manipulates Daryl into attacking those…