By: Jessica Goddard Despite its inexplicable first-rate cast, Blackbird is an eye-rollingly disappointing take on the terminal illness drama from director Roger Michell (Notting Hill, My Cousin Rachel). Screenwriter Christian Torpe paints with a bland palette of stock characters to slap together a narrative infested with clichés and unnatural one-liners, leading nowhere of interest.
What begins as an attempt to record a widowed, middle-aged pilot’s efforts to find true love on the dating app Tinder quickly morphs into something much darker and chaotic in director Al Bailey’s documentary DTF. As the pilot in question, an old friend of Bailey’s identified only by the pseudonym “Christian”, reveals increasingly outlandish and destructive behavior, the original premise of the film is abandoned in favour of an exploration of the toxic, hard-partying world…
Pascal Plante’s Nadia, Butterfly eerily takes place at the now-cancelled 2020 Tokyo Olympics, and follows a French Canadian Olympian swimmer as she participates in her final event as a professional athlete. Lovingly directed yet glacially paced, Nadia, Butterfly boasts some excellent performances and cinematography, but struggles to overcome its vague characterizations and meandering screenplay.
In a romantic movie, a relationship’s break-up is simply used as a story device – a stepping stone towards the rising action. But, writer/director Natalie Krinsky uses this turning point as the main focus in her rom-com The Broken Hearts Gallery, a conventional film with a few good laughs and character-driven surprises along the way.
Filmmakers like to carve out their niche. For instance, George A. Romero had the horror genre and, more importantly, he clung on to zombie culture. He was always experimenting with the undead. If his ideas didn’t pan out, he moved on to the next project with more ambition than before. In a similar vein, writer/director David Ayer (Suicide Squad, Bright) likes the action genre and, more importantly, he’s clung on to gang culture and its…
Ravage is essentially a campfire story for mature audiences: there’s a lot of build up, an unsettling suggestion of what could happen, and then a freaky follow through. What we learn throughout the film, however, is that writer/director Teddy Grennan and the film’s nincompoop producers are incapable of closing their set-ups. This is demonstrated by some earlier mini murders, making us apprehensive about its grand finale when a ludicrous torture chamber is invented and utterly…
By: Jolie Featherstone Unjoo Moon’s I Am Woman is a loving biopic of Helen Reddy, the artist who created the iconic song ‘I Am Woman’, the anthem of the women’s movement in the 1970s.
The premise Luke Eve’s I Met a Girl, a rather poignant road trip/love story, runs the risk of romanticizing mental illness, but manages to instead provide a positive opening for neurodiverse communities.
By: Trevor Chartrand The poor, misguided filmmakers behind Up on the Glass use this film as an opportunity to show off amateur movie-making skills at their most mundane. The entire execution of this motion picture – from the script, to the cast, to the camerawork, and beyond – is a masterpiece of dull.
Benjamin Ross Hayden’s futuristic sci-fi Parallel Minds begins with the invention of Red Eye 2, an improved ocular device that allows you to relive precious memories and record new ones. As the launch approaches, Red Eye researcher Margo (Tommie-Amber Pirie) works closely with the product’s head developer. In a shocking turn, the developer turns up dead; prompting a withered detective, Thomas (Greg Bryk), to look for answers behind the alleged murder. Margo assists him because,…