The short films featured at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival are always worth a watch. The selections hardly miss, and audiences are usually given a wide collection of different types of horror told from diverse perspectives. The shorts I did catch at this year’s film festival were consistent with the past, but also included some all-timer scares and laughs.
Nobody “phones it in” for Mathieu Turi’s subterranean thriller The Deep Dark, although their efforts are for naught; simply because this movie isn’t a good fit for their work.
With Anatomy of a Fall, writer/director Justine Triet gives audiences one of the most realistic courtroom dramas ever made for the big screen.
The swashbuckling comedic action-adventure sub-genre featuring a macho man saving a high-profile damsel in distress seems like a dated idea. It’s possible for filmmakers and storytellers to modernize this premise (The Lost City as a recent example), but to leave this two-dimensional dynamic at its infant stages for most of the movie feels like a no-win risk. If this is generally agreed upon, then pardon me for the switcheroo: I had a lot of fun with…
By: Trevor Chartrand Director Danny Madden brings us 15 Cameras, the second sequel to 2015’s 13 Cameras, just in time for this year’s spooky season. The third entry in this series is serviceable, with an interesting twist on the original premise. It’s a creepy thriller through-and-through, despite being a tad obvious with its metaphors.
By: Jolie Featherstone Ariane Louis-Seize’s feature film directorial debut, Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, is an intriguing horror-dramedy that has the makings of a cult classic. Think gothic Wes Anderson, or Richard Ayoade’s Submarine (2010) meets Tomas Alfredson’s Let The Right One In (2008).
David Farrier is an intrepid journalist and documentarian, but he may have met his match with Mister Organ, an unconventional film that changes its purpose almost as often as its subject changes his personality.
The Vancouver Horror Show Film Festival (VHS) has been scaring the socks off west coast audiences since 2018. In just a few short years, VHS has developed a reputation as one of the most diverse and exciting genre film festivals in Canada.
As the youngest child in a large family of Iranian immigrants, Leila (Layla Mohammadi) has always felt like she hasn’t lived up to expectations; especially her often distracted mother Shireen (Niousha Noor). In her current years as a young adult, Leila has felt more distance grown between her and her mom. And as an expectant mother after a one-night-stand with an eccentric actor (Tom Byrne), Leila only anticipates the worse.
