Leading the Canadian Screen Awards with 14 nominations, Brother is an enthralling family drama that’s well realized by Lie With Me director Clement Virgo. Though comparisons to 2016’s Oscar winner Moonlight and 2019’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco are inevitable given the coming-of-age material and how a family’s dynamic is examined during a sprawling time frame, Brother still stands out as a true Canadian original.
The Quiet Girl appears to tell a simple story about a young girl, Cáit (newcomer Catherine Clinch, who shows incredible range in her brilliant and award-winning acting debut). She’s relocated to live with foster parents for a Summer to relieve the tension in her household. The house she moves to temporarily is owned by a sweet, older couple (Carrie Crowley, Andrew Bennett), and Cáit is almost immediately met with nurturing support. Following an expected trope in…
The 95th Academy Awards are tonight! Are any of Wylie Writes’ favourite flicks on the list of nominees? Have some of these titles have already been praised by the Academy Awards? Are there any hidden gems that may have not made the cut? The answers are: yes, yes and absolutely!
I Like Movies, a coming-of-age dramedy set in the early-2000s, alternates between the double life of 17-year-old Burlington native Lawrence Kweller (Isiah Lehtinen): an outspoken high school senior and an obsessive film buff at his local video store, Sequels Video, who is simply trying to fit in. 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…
It’s been over a decade since being first exposed to Canadian cult hit Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter and Lee Demarbre’s wholesome filmmaking for mature audiences. Underneath its goofy and ambitious premise about our lord and saviour socking it to some blood-suckers was an infectious love for filmmaking and community. It’s main concern other than entertaining audiences was having fun with friends behind-the-scenes. And while that rallying doesn’t always work for all indies, it benefited Demarbre’s…
A coming-of-age story centring around an adult’s personal issues with their adoption would be really interesting and, quite frankly, a cathartic outlet for those viewers who share similar feelings. Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul is very close to pulling off this type of character study, but it doesn’t quite go as far as it can with this premise.
The silly controversy following actor Andrea Riseborough and the grassroots campaigning that garnered her a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her role in To Leslie is, unfortunately, distracting attention away from how terrific the performance is and how good the film itself is as well.
The French-Canadian produced animated movie Katak, The Brave Beluga is a copycat of other family flicks. But as far as knock-offs go, this is certainly one of the better ones.
In a plot that would make any vacationer anxious, and in the “not too distant future”, novelist James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård) and his wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) are suckered into a crime that develops into an additional crime during a getaway at a luxurious resort. James, who becomes the most guilty, is given the choice to opt out of his execution if he pays a lump sum of cash for a clone to be made…
“Found footage” horrors often receive a bad rap because it’s presumed that they’re “easy” movies to make: scrounge together a couple thousand dollars, a consumer video camera, some amateur actors, and a loose lore around something eerie that can guarantee jump scares. Yes, the “found footage” sub-genre is one of the more resourceful outlets for DIY filmmakers, but there’s an art to it. They may not trick audiences anymore into thinking the stories are non-fictitious…