By: Mark Barber Andrew Cymek’s Night Cries is the product of a variety of recycled ideas and premises from other movies. Taking cues from The Matrix, Twelve Monkeys, Mad Max and dozens of other sci-fi/action films, Cymek’s film is too self-serious and rarely entertaining. Cymek (who also wrote, produced, and edited the film) plays Joseph, a man who searches for his wife in a post-apocalyptic world dominated by weird creatures and a gang of people…
By: Mark Barber Billy Ray’s Secret in Their Eyes, an American remake of Juan José Campanella’s 2009 film of the same name, is eerily reminiscent, both thematically and atmospherically, of Denis Villeneuve’s thriller Prisoners, but without going “full-blown Hollywood” in the last act. In other words, Secret in Their Eyes succeeds where Prisoners didn’t, and in ways that highlight the moral ambiguity of its political context. Much like how Prisoners worked as a moderately effective…
By: Mark Barber Those unfamiliar with the intensity and insanity of Sion Sono’s films might be understandably overwhelmed by the excessively violent Tag, one of six films that the Japanese filmmaker has made this year (Love & Peace is also playing at Toronto After Dark, and his fantastic and unconventional sci-fi drama The Whispering Star played at TIFF last month). Others, however, will find Tag to be yet another exhilarating action-packed outing from Sono. Narrative-wise,…
By: Mark Barber The Creeping Garden – a documentary about the professional and amateur fascination with slime mould in the scientific community – is a film without an argument; a particularly troublesome direction to take with the documentary genre. The film begins misleadingly with archival news footage detailing the discovery of an unknown, slimy substance found in Texas, suggesting that the direction the film will be a generic blend between documentary and horror; similar to two…
By: Mark Barber Goodnight Mommy exists at the intersection between Dead Ringers and Psycho, with a little bit of Misery thrown in for good measure. Twins Lukas and Elias (named for their actors, Lukas and Elias Schwarz) settle into their country home with their mother (Susanne Wuest), who is recovering from facial surgery after a brutal car accident. In the midst of divorce proceedings, she does not take the trauma and stress well, and begins…
Trapped in a hair salon while chaos ensues outside, the characters of Arab and Tarzan Nasser’s tensely-written Dégradé are confronted by the worsening socio-economic conditions of Palestine: frequent brownouts, lack of security, armed conflict, and ideological extremism. The Nasser twins use their diverse range of female characters – all differing in terms of devoutness, personality, and in some cases cultural background – to weave together a flowing, stimulating dialogue on the political and social climate…
By: Mark Barber Love is about reconciling romance with sex; something its director, French provocateur Gaspar Noé, and the film’s main protagonist, Murphy (Karl Glusman), agree on. Whether or not Noé is successful in marrying romance and sex (and whether they are even really that diametrically opposed outside of some conceptions of pornography) doesn’t matter. Love faults in so many other ways, it’s easy to ignore its ambition. Love tells the story of the turbulent…
By: Mark Barber Chaitanya Tamhane’s courtroom drama, aptly titled Court, has received broad international acclaim for its compelling minimalism and intelligent use of realism, but also deserves praise for its insightful analysis on the lingering effects of colonialism on India’s legal system. Understated and distanced, Court eschews the familiar Hollywood-style intensity of John Grisham adaptations. A procedural take on the Indian legal systems and the personal lives related to one case, Court examines its postcolonial…
By: Mark Barber Adam Macdonald’s Backcountry is a terrifying mix of Jaws and Blair Witch, but manages to avoid the usual kitschy pastiche of recent Canadian genre films. Unlike the campiness of Wolfcop and Hobo with a Shotgun, Backcountry is an intense, serious horror film. Inspired loosely by tragic events, Backcountry follows a Toronto couple, Alex (Jeff Roop) and Jenn (Missy Peregrym), as they become lost in a camping trip in a northern Ontario park….
By: Mark Barber The post-apocalyptic Canadian film Turbo Kid has only one audience in mind: kids who grew up on Power Rangers. Yet the film is too gruesome and violent for kids, and too vacuous for anyone else. Set in a desolate post-apocalyptic world, an unnamed kid (Degrassi’s Munro Chambers; character simply billed as “The Kid”) finds a suit that formerly belonged to the comic book/real life superhero character Turbo Man (unrelated to a similar character…