On the Adamant, the latest endeavor from French documentary filmmaker Nicholas Philibert (The Land of the Deaf, Each and Every Moment, Nénette), is an almost deceptively subtle film. Following staff and clients of a psychiatric day centre on a floating structure in the Siene River in central Paris, On the Adamant combines slow, languid shots of the river (and the city that surrounds it) with interviews and scenes of the centre’s daily activities where patients paint, play…
A movie based on a Broadway musical that is, in turn, based on a two-decade old cult classic teen comedy doesn’t exactly read like a recipe for cinematic success. The original Mean Girls, released in 2004, was directed by Mark Waters (2003’s Freaky Friday, Just Like Heaven) and featured performances from some of the biggest teen stars of the early aught’s — including Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, and Amanda Seyfried. It was an instant hit,…
The smoke sauna tradition of Vőromaa, in southern Estonia, is nearly a thousand years old. On UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage of the world, smoke sauna practices include the building and maintenance of saunas, smoking meat, making bath whisks, and bathing and cleaning rituals.
Joy (Max Eigenmann) is a Filipina immigrant living in the UK with her young daughter, Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla). Because of her undocumented status, Joy struggles to make ends meet and provide a safe, stable home for Grace — often living secretly in the homes she cleans while the wealthy families who live there are away on vacation. But when the aloof and uptight Katherine (Leanne Best) hires Joy as a live-in care-worker for her…
In 2002, Robert Wiliam Pickton was arrested for a series of shocking murders that took place on the rural property he owned with his brother, just a few kilometers east of Vancouver, British Columbia. For years, Pickton had been hunting women in the city’s notorious Downtown East Side. He chose sex workers, many of whom were Indigenous women and other women of colour, as his victims. The nature and details of Pickton’s crimes, which included…
Shannon Page’s coverage of this year’s Vancouver Horror Show Film Festival (VHS) concludes with reviews of two spooky features – Faceless After Dark and V/H/S/85.
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.
In Stars Fell Again, the extra-cheesy follow-up to 2021’s decidedly unfunny Stars Fell on Alabama from returning director V.W. Scheich, suffers from many of the same flaws as its predecessor — weak characterization, poor pacing, and a lead couple that’s about as interesting as a stack of wet cardboard.
As one of the very first celebrity chefs, Charlie Trotter spent the early 2000s on top of the culinary world. In her new documentary Love, Charlie: The Rise and Fall of Chef Charlie Trotter, writer/director Rebecca Halpern (History Channel’s Gangland) traces Charlie’s rise to prominence and the enduring mark that he left on the culinary world.
