Triangle of Sadness pitches itself as a sophisticated comedy with “biting” satire about elitist attitudes during class wars. However, the jabs made by writer/director Ruben Östlund are nothing more than the filmmaker taking hackneyed swings at low-hanging fruit for a really, really long time.
Brett Morgen is a brilliant documentarian as seen in The Kid Stays in the Picture, Jane, and Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck – the last flick mentioned being, what I believe, is one of the best movies ever made about a musician. His latest endeavour Moonage Daydream, a documentary about enigmatic artist David Bowie, is cut from the same cloth as Montage of Heck with the movie resembling a mixture of mediums but, this time,…
Set in the theatre district of London’s West End in 1953, a production of Agatha Christie’s whodunit The Mousetrap seems to be cursed after the body of flagrant director Leo Kopernick (Adrien Brody) turns up dead after the show. The jaded Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and rookie investigator Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan) are assigned to the case, and it seems as if everyone’s a suspect: the actors, the crew, the waiting staff and, to Stalker’s…
Brett Morgen is a brilliant documentarian as seen in Jane and Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck – the latter being one of the best movies ever made about a musician. His latest endeavour Moonage Daydream, a documentary about enigmatic artist David Bowie, is cut from the same cloth as Montage of Heck but, this time, it’s billed as more of a “cinematic experience”. And, it appears that most of the production’s focus has been applied…
Environmental lawyer Aurora (Noëlle Schönwald) has sought out refuge in Canada after her husband is mysteriously killed. She flees across the border from Colombia and then, after some additional information is explained about Aurora’s backstory, the film fast-forwards to the refugee’s contemporary lifestyle in Toronto. Despite finding new roots and separating herself from the past, some new reminders and concerning sightings have Aurora second-guessing her identity.
Anthony Michael Hall (also serving as a producer) stars as an embittered school administrator in writer/director Nicholas Celozzi’s The Class, an update of the 1985 classic The Breakfast Club (in which Hall played the nerdy Brian Johnson). Sadly, The Class never manages to grow beyond the shadow of its famous predecessor.
Set in the early-2000s, I Like Movies alternates between the double life of 17-year-old Burlington native Lawrence Kweller (Isiah Lehtinen) as an outspoken high school senior and an obsessive film buff at his local video store, Sequels Video. Lawrence is an opinionated know-it-all under both roofs, but he feels more in his element at Sequels and is elated when they finally hire him on as an employee.
As much as I would love to compare David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future to his earlier horrors, I’m afraid I’m unqualified because I haven’t seen enough of that catalogue. However, I can see a contrast between the Canadian’s long-awaited return to filmmaking and his other recent dramatic work such as A History of Violence, Eastern Promises, and A Dangerous Method – all of which also star Viggo Mortensen. Crimes of the Future, a gruesome…
By: Jeff Ching While watching This Land, I was reminded of 2011’s experimental documentary Life in a Day. For that movie (produced by Ridley Scott, directed by Kevin Macdonald), participants all over the world were asked to shoot a day in their lives (July 24, 2010) and the finished film would serve as a time capsule to capture a collective human experience, with the main theme of interconnectedness. This Land (executive produced by Jim Cummings of Thunder Road…
