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Drama

Reviews

Jane

By: Jolie Featherstone Sabrina Jaglom’s Jane is a drama-thriller that grapples with tough themes such as grief, isolation, and cyber-bullying within an upper-class prep-school.

Reviews

BlackBerry

Using his previous film, the embellished period thriller Operation Avalanche, as a stepping stone towards his latest feature, Canadian renegade Matt Johnson takes another crack at the biopic genre with BlackBerry.  Director Johnson (co-writing with frequent collaborator/producer Matthew Miller) chronicles the rise and fall of the titular game-changing portable device that allowed users online access and exclusive text-based communication.

Reviews

Riceboy Sleeps

Drawing from some of his own experiences, in Riceboy Sleeps, writer/director Anthony Shim tells an immigrant’s tale of a Korean mother, So-Young (Choi Seung-yoon), and her son Dong-Hyun (a shared role by young Dohyun Noel Hwang and teen Ethan Hwang) attempting to build a new life in Canada after the loss of So-Young’s schizophrenic husband.  While in Canada, they’re faced with discrimination towards their race and So-Young’s meekness – both of them dealing with variations of…

Reviews

Bystanders

By: Trevor Chartrand Directed and co-written by Canadian actor/filmmaker Koumbie, Bystanders is an exploration of a high-concept ‘what-if?’ scenario;  a film which specifically ponders the question of our own accountability and societal responsibility with regards to the actions of others.

Reviews

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

There’s a purposeful lack of characterization in How to Blow Up a Pipeline because the story is built off of shared passion and mutual frustration between a team of amateur environmental activists/eco-terrorists who are tired of waiting for a difference to be made.  They’ve been pushed to their limits after being promised that a change is approaching.  How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a very angry movie, and it’s also one of the best…

Reviews

Soft

By: Trevor Chartrand Soft (which was featured in TIFF’s Discovery program last year) is a coming-of-age drama that, while captivating, can be difficult to watch – largely due to its meandering nature.

Reviews

ReBroken

By: Jeff Ching ReBroken is an ambitious and unique exploration of grief that qualifies as a thriller, drama, horror and a mystery.  It’s an unpredictable puzzle that the audience slowly pieces together.  But despite that selling point, I can’t wholeheartedly recommend Rebroken.  I will always applaud a filmmaker for taking risks over playing it safe.  However, I didn’t enjoy this experience, which could’ve been fixed had the film built an essential emotional connection to the material.

Reviews

You Can Live Forever

You Can Live Forever is the latest romance in queer cinema to tell a story about “forbidden love” in unlikely places, as two young women start falling for each other within their Jehovah Witness community.  It’s a good movie that not only shows an accurate portrayal of yearning hearts, but also teaches viewers about the upbringing in this specific devout life – the film is emotional and educational.

Reviews

Brother

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.