Mercedes Bryce Morgan directs the provocative Bone Lake. While the press notes assure me that Mercedes Bryce Morgan is a single person, this messy and conflicted film feels as though it was a tug of war between three creatives named Mercedes, Bryce, and Morgan. Bone Lake is bookended by its best (and bloodiest) bits. The film kicks off with a stark naked couple, fearfully running away from crossbow arrows before being outrageously impaled. This opener is immature,…
Bruce Sweeney (Crimes of Mike Recket, The Dick Knost Show) returns to the big screen (since 2018’s Kingsway) with She Talks to Strangers, a brazenly funny black comedy that gives the Canadian filmmaker a turn to mine for gold in the trends of compulsive true crime followings. The backbone of Sweeney’s Toronto-set thriller, however, is the condensed, character-driven story of clumsy curmudgeons picking feuds with each other to gain a sense of control. Leslie (Camille…
40 Acres represents the best qualities of Canadian cinema. R.T. Thorne’s outstanding survival thriller is enormously entertaining with taut and rhythmic tension, but the movie also pitches hauntingly beautiful scenery (a near-future dystopia using Northern Ontario as a backdrop) and a metaphorical vision about land being usurped from minorities. The blockbuster hit A Quiet Place was a sensory experience for audiences to perceive the stark hopelessness of an apocalypse through silences. In comparison, 40 Acres offers movie goers…
The Woman in the Yard finds Blumhouse Productions singing a different tune compared to their back catalogue of modern horror classics. It’s a tune that’s still worth singing, but it isn’t without some unnecessary vibrato that may rub some people the wrong way. The premise starts out simple enough: a single, depressed mother, Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler of Netflix’s western The Harder They Fall) and her two kids (Peyton Jackson, Estella Kahiha), who already have a tense…
Sharp Corner is a character study of repressed, prickly ambiguity from writer/director Jason Buxton (Blackbird). The McCalls feel as though they’ve moved into the perfect house, until they discover an unfortunate wrinkle behind their rural address. Their new house looks out to a winding backroad that challenges vehicles to its turn. The drivers that succumb to the rough road turn up in the McCalls’ front yard where they’re either fatally injured or dead. This becomes…
Primarily coming from a background in television and documentary filmmaking, for his feature-length effort Last Breath, director/co-writer Alex Parkinson adapts one of his docs of the same name that chronicled this same story of a stranded and submerged saturation diver. During some underwater pipeline maintenance, a disruption leads to a snagged, and ultimately severed, oxygen supply for the diver. As his team works to save him, the diver tries to conserve the last of his…
Known as “The G” to family, anger hangs off of Ann Hunter (Dale Dickey of Leave No Trace and Hell or High Water). As the primary caregiver for her ailing husband despite feeling as though everyone perceives her as a liability, Ann doesn’t have time to sugarcoat anything through her utter exhaustion. When she and her husband are abruptly relocated from their suburban home to a care facility by their legal guardian, Ann is upset…
Cat-and-mouse thriller Pins & Needles can’t escape its flaws. Unfortunately for editor-turn-filmmaker James Villeneuve, there’s plenty of them in his feature-length debut (which had its world premiere last month at the Blood in the Snow Canadian Film Festival).
With an impressively involving story using multiple methods to scare the viewer, Hold Your Breath is just the ticket for this year’s Halloween season.
