By: Addison Wylie Taking a break from his independent fare, filmmaker David Gordon Green got familiar with the Apatow brat pack – launching him to direct the uneven but oddly memorable Pineapple Express. His directorial hand was embraced and pushed him down a path helming louder movies like Your Highness and The Sitter, two off-putting crudities that aren’t worthy of Green’s time and talent. With Prince Avalanche, it feels as if Green is making the…
By: Addison Wylie You’re Next presents a fairly standard murder mystery. An estranged, slightly disgruntled family meets at a lovely house to celebrate a wedding anniversary and before they know it, the first guest is assassinated during dinner. What starts as a film that seems to be wanting to follow similar horror footsteps, stops winking towards the camera once the kills commence. It plays each trope with a straight face and sticks to a formula,…
By: Addison Wylie The Oxbow Cure had me shivering for all sorts of reasons. Directors Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas are able to flawlessly create moods and feelings using minimalist tactics. With its few instances of dialogue aside, this low budget Kickstarter passion project is practically a silent film as we watch a distressed but tranquil woman named Lena (played carefully by playwright Claudia Dey) escape to a snowy cabin in the woods to carry…
By: Addison Wylie The last thing I expect to feel during “riotous and outrageous sexual exploration” is snooze-inducing boredom. That was the case with My Awkward Sexual Adventure, an unadulterated Canadian sex comedy that sets up an array of absurd situations only to do nothing but fumble around. I hate pointing all the blame towards one individual, but with My Awkward Sexual Adventure, it’s tough not to do that when Jonas Chernick is the source…
By: Addison Wylie With intensity comes pressure, and with pressure comes fear. Tobias Lindholm’s A Hijacking has all of the above. Lindholm’s excellent film is shot and edited as a docudrama and often reminded me of Paul Greengrass’ United 93 regarding how it treats its audience as flies on the wall. But where United 93 was based on a real life tragic event, A Hijacking’s story isn’t directly based on a true story but still…
By: Addison Wylie The image of the feeble pirogue (the film’s featured boat) floating in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean is a perfect metaphor to describe my abandoned interest towards Moussa Touré’s drama La Pirogue. I wanted to like Touré’s film. A title card leading to the end credits dedicating the film to those who have made the trek – and may have died – from Africa to Europe to seek a better life…
Movie theatres can make all the difference when it comes to the movie. Some people have sadly given up on the actual moviegoing experience and hopped on over to home streaming VOD devices. It’s a bittersweet feeling realizing that you can’t blame these people for doing so. Home theatre equipment is much more accessible nowadays; and, plenty of movies are available during – or before – their theatrical release. At home, you don’t have annoying…
By: Addison Wylie The good news: Joshua Michael Stern’s biopic Jobs never feels inappropriate or tasteless. It hardly feels as if the film was made with ill-advised intentions or to meet a strict relevancy deadline. However, I can see a large portion of the movie going public leaving the theatre at the end wishing there was more to Stern’s film chronicling the life and times of the late inventor and Apple guru Steve Jobs. Jobs…
By: Addison Wylie This year’s first “save the President” action yarn, Olympus Has Fallen, is a D movie trying to fill B movie shoes. It’s a movie that should buckle audiences in for ecstatic escapist entertainment. Unfortunately, it’s trying too hard to have its cake and eat it too by becoming too emotionally involved. We’ve all seen mindless action flicks that centre around a terrorist attack. We may have also seen one of these action films…
By: Addison Wylie I can only write a review for Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight with a biased opinion. Not only am I a fan of Linklater’s two previous acquaintances with romantics Jesse and Céline (both played wonderfully by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy), but I’m also someone who fell head over heels for someone lovely who soon became my wife, and we proceed to take long walks and ramble until we forget where we were…