By: Addison Wylie The Hallow is made up of great parts that build towards a fleeting good time. The adult audience gets as much satisfaction out of it as a toddler does with a mall’s mechanical horse. Within the film’s undistinguished Irish town, the community unanimously agrees that the woods are not necessarily a great place to idle. Their distain is brought out when a family of out-of-towners move to a secluded millhouse that happens…
By: Addison Wylie Let’s not beat around the bush: the most comparable film you can mention when talking about Kyle Rankin’s Night of the Living Deb is Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead. Both Shaun and Deb are underdogs dealing with a zombie outbreak on the fly while trying to figure out their own issues with romance. The strongest thing you can say about Rankin’s horror/comedy is that while Night of the Living Deb is…
By: Addison Wylie I don’t regret liking HBO’s Entourage even though Doug Ellin’s cinematic continuation of the hit TV series stinks. The television show offered a sleek albeit heightened look into the politics and smooth-talkers behind Hollywood. Actor Vincent Chase was a lucrative asset to any major motion picture, and his friends witnessed this as they tagged along for the ride. Frequently vulgar and overtly macho, Entourage was amusing escapism that made filmdom look and…
By: Shannon Page Written and directed by Jeff Lipsky (Twelve Thirty, Molly’s Theory of Everything), Mad Women aims to challenge audience’s perceptions of desire and family by fearlessly ripping into taboo territory – but whether it succeeds or not is up for debate. Nevada Smith (Kelsey Lynn Stokes) is an attractive young woman struggling to find her place in a family of over-achievers that include her older sister, a doctor working overseas; her father (Reed…
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: Addison Wylie Life With Derek’s Michael Seater gets his directorial feet wet with the ensemble dramedy People Hold On. It’s a good place for the budding filmmaker to start. The film itself is contained within few environments and doesn’t call for visual tricks, which leaves Seater a lot of time to draw characters and connect with his tight-knit cast. The filmmaker must’ve also felt another level of comfort and confidence knowing co-star Paula Brancati – whom…
By: Addison Wylie Toronto Youth Shorts’ T24 challenges filmmakers to create, finish, and submit a short film to the festival’s committee within 24-hours. Before heading out to plan their production, each team is given a page-long mission statement for the challenge documenting the themes that their works should fulfill. This year, festival director Henry Wong and his team were inspired by recent, humbling articles complimenting the GTA. The Toronto Youth Shorts committee state the long and…
By: Addison Wylie “Have you ever exceeded the limits of pain?” Now, I have. When Your Flesh Screams is in need of more lighting, more rewrites, more experienced actors, and more time in an edit bay. Most of all, Guillermo Martínez’s low-rent ode to exploitation-horror is in need of someone to show it the door. This is a film made by people who have seen raw works like Last House on the Left and are only interested in the…
By: Addison Wylie We’ve all seen some variation of “crazy” in supermarket tabloids and on afternoon television programming, but Finders Keepers looks past what some would define as “too wild to be true” and finds the humanity behind the headlines. That’s not to say the story this documentary follows isn’t wacky – it absolutely is. In what could only be described as fate, John Wood and Shannon Whisnant were brought together after Whisnant found Wood’s…
By: Addison Wylie New Yorkers must’ve sensed something was up when the Big Apple was suddenly populated by topless female protesters. Then, celebrities like Miley Cyrus, Cara Delevingne, and Lena Dunham were throwing their support behind trending hashtag #FreeTheNipple. Something was definitely up. Alas, it was all for Lina Esco’s movie Free the Nipple and the empowering mission supporting it. Esco and various other activists seen in Free the Nipple feel very passionately about inequality…