Mixing humour into a documentary about a serious subject can be a dicey move. American Cats: The Good, the Bad, and the Cuddly, the second runner-up for the Hot Docs Rogers Audience Award pulls off this challenge despite some close calls.
Ever since the the death of Leonard Watson in 2006, aspiring filmmaker Kurtis Watson has struggled to find closure and understand his Dad’s decision to commit suicide. It’s been an upsetting topic for his family, who are either still grieving or are more in the dark than Kurtis about the tragedy.
When I wrote about Ryan Ward’s directorial feature debut Son of the Sunshine, I was humbled by the filmmaker’s response to my unenthused review. I had labeled his film as “maple syrup melancholy”, a term I coined to encompass Canada’s ongoing trend of churning out depressing, empty movies. I thought the term was clever, Ward didn’t think so. The Canadian writer/director advised that, while disliking a movie and its motives is fine, labelling art can…
Movie goers who have been caught rolling their eyes at “chapter narratives” will be pleasantly surprised by Sean Garrity’s The Burning Season, a reversed romantic drama that unravels an affair between two star-crossed lovers.
My Animal, the feature-length directorial debut from music video cinematographer Jacqueline Castel, is a dramatic horror that offers a unique breath of fresh air to the coming-of-age sub-genre.
The Hyperborean has been written and directed by filmmakers who have been serving a 10-year sentence in my personal “movie jail” since being responsible for the gross-out body horror Septic Man. After missing their recent collaborations, director Jesse Thomas Cook and screenwriter Tony Burgess have appeared on my radar with their latest sci-fi mashup The Hyperborean and, thankfully, it’s pretty good.
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 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.
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.
Canadian filmmaker Jeremy LaLonde is becoming the go-to guy to find humour in despicable people. After taking a brief break to make an experimental drama (Ashgrove), LaLonde finds himself easing back into his comedic element with Daniel’s Gotta Die, a dark comedy about an inheritance-hungry, ne’er-do-well family being reigned in by a goodnatured sibling.