I’m not afraid of heights. However, as I watched Fall with bated breath, I felt chills and quivers in my back and my legs which I’ve never felt before. Watching the movie’s climb-savvy leads (wayward friends played by Grace Fulton and Virginia Gardner) scale a 2,000 radio tower in the middle of the desert was enough for me to clasp my armrest. Watching them dangle from the tower after being stranded at the top was…
For three years, I have received an annual movie about the Tham Luang cave rescue. First, we had the experienced first responders recreating their efforts in Cave Rescue. Then, the team behind Free Solo made a documentary about the disaster with The Rescue. And now, the story receives the “Hollywood” treatment with Ron Howard’s Thirteen Lives. Despite my personal exhaustion with this story, I was excited to see how this latest adaptation measured up to…
By: Trevor Chartrand Based on a true story, Brotherhood is a harrowing tale of survival that recounts the tragedy beset upon a boy’s summer camp in Balsam Lake, Ontario in 1926. On the night of July 20, thirteen boys and two camp counsellors set out to cross the lake in a canoe to gather food and supplies for the camp. They encountered high winds that capsized the boat, leaving them floating in the cold water…
It’s normal for an audience to be distracted by the picturesque Alaskan landscape in Sugar Mountain or the tunes sang by Blackwater Railroad Company. After all, filmmaker Richard Gray uses these pleasant qualities to soften up his highly unlikable movie.
By: Shannon Page Andrew Moxham’s White Raven follows four friends (Andrew Dunbar, Steve Bradley, Aaron Brooks, and Shane Twerdun) as they head out for a weekend of male-bonding in the remote wilderness. When one of the friends (Bradley) slowly begins to lose touch with reality, the others find themselves fighting for their lives. There is a lot going on beneath White Raven’s by-the-books survivalist horror surface. At its core, the film makes a serious attempt to…
By: Trevor Jeffery James (Patrick McFadden) is a typical 20-something living in Toronto facing a quarter-life crisis: he’s got a job he hates along with a boss he hates, a girlfriend towards whom he is apathetic, and he is tired of the city’s drone. The final straw is a devastating diagnosis, after which he packs up and leaves everything behind for the dense woods of British Columbia. Camping out and surviving with only packed sundries…
By: Addison Wylie Jeremy Gardner’s slow burn horror The Battery has earned crowds of cheers reaching back to its early film festival days from genre movie goers. Even though I wasn’t sold on this flabby flick, that’s great news for the filmmaker. It’s a zombie movie that hardly shows you any of the walking dead. That’s a tough sell! You see limited amounts of zombies because Gardner wants to set his sights more on the…
By: Addison Wylie I didn’t like The Disappeared, but I can at least compliment its opening shots. Director Shandi Mitchell quickly establishes the nothingness that exists around a crew of lost men at sea. Mitchell generates an instantaneous sense of fear and hopelessness as the vagueness in their whereabouts and time of day effects the audience greatly. Then, someone speaks. And, more people speak. It’s not so much speaking as it is projecting and emphasizing…