By Elias Savada. Unfolding with military precision, enhanced by a steady, determined pacing…. We can be an ingenious species. When bad things happen, there are any number of special people who come up with solutions to seemingly unsolvable, life-threatening problems. The crippled Apollo 13 spacecraft is often called mankind’s greatest feat of improvised […]
A Bond Finale, Directed by a Yankee: No Time to Die
By Elias Savada. In other words, nothing new. Same slick package, different psychopathic enemy.” Are you ready to put your troubles aside and hopefully not worry about the semi-masked fool sitting a few seats away from you in the multiplex (for 163 minutes, a Bond record) as you watch Daniel […]
Documenting Personal History in Belgrade: Marko Grba Singh on Rampart
By Yun-hua Chen. The idea of the film didn’t stem from the footage, but from the apartment. My parents decided to sell it, and it was empty for several months. I have lived there for 25 years, and once per month I would go there…. And then I realized that […]
“Stories About Heroes Travel Faster Than Bullets”: Jean Luc Herbulot’s Saloum (TIFF 2021)
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. 84 minutes of pure African genre mayhem, with little interest in pausing long enough for you to catch your breath….with this Senegalese western-action-horror hybrid Herbulot is here to sure as hell make you recognize [the historical context] on a sensory, emotional level.” Strap in; Jean Luc Herbulot’s […]
Annette: a Coming-of-Age Miracle
by Levan Tskhovrebadze. It seems as the French director torments himself over personal misfortune; however, he summons paradoxes of life and transpires this absurdist tragedy as a coming-of-age spectacle for the baby miracle Annette.” “Each man kills the thing he lovesby each let this be heard”–Oscar Wilde Oscar Wilde’s gloomy […]
Lay Down Your Souls – Venom: Let There Be Carnage
By Elias Savada. A frothy, silly flick, full of gory hijinks and dumbster fun. Let the slapstick continue.” I wonder if anyone at Columbia Pictures, the studio that has that small chunk of the other Marvel action figures that Disney hasn’t encased, remembers that it was also the movie company […]
The Many Saints of Newark: A Fond, Bloody Prequel
By Elias Savada. Brutal and deadly, as expected, and a fiercely written gangster drama, the film is also a fitting period piece….” The best things about HBO’s The Sopranos were the deeply emotional heft of its characters and, of course, the brutality they constantly extracted upon one another. Fans of […]
Toxic Dreams of Kate Bush: Bertrand Mandico’s After Blue (TIFF 2021)
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. A bedazzled, audacious dreamscape riddled with sex and violence and the ever-present spirit of high fashion…. we drift in and out of After Blue like something akin to a fever dream….” If your first encounter with the film worlds of French art-weirdo auteur genius Bertrand Mandico doesn’t […]
Inexorable and the Suffocating Expanses of Fabrice Du Welz (TIFF 2021)
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. This Belgian filmmaker’s extraordinary mastery over space and his ability to manipulate our experience of it draws me into his frequently dark, sometimes tragic and commonly perverse movies.” There are few filmmakers whose movies so effectively create a sense of claustrophobia, of suffocation, of being closed in […]
“A Trial, by Nature, is Theatre” – Real to Reel: Truth and Trickery in Courtroom Movies
A Book Review by Tanja Bresan. An insightful and well researched book on judicial processes and views on expressing justice, its meaning, and duplicity within the Hollywood courtroom film genre.” Truth and Trickery in Courtroom Movies (Vandeplas Publishing, 2021) written and researched by two prominent law professors and cinephiles – […]