I would not call The Whistlers one of the best entries in the emerging Romanian New Wave canon, though that doesn’t take away from what Corneliu Porumboiu does well. His darkly acerbic humour migrates from his previous works, this film being particularly reminiscent of Police, Adjective in the way he revisits the crime genre and continues to…
I would not expect Bertrand Bonello to do anything less than what he does with Zombi Child, his first feature since the polarizing Nocturama—and, on the face of it, a much less ambitious project in terms of physical scope. Unlike the expensive shopping mall that serves as Nocturama’s apex, the production design here is minimal,…
Bleak and oblique, Nadiv Lapid’s Synonyms trains us on the most curious of subjects: an attractive man in a mustard overcoat who wanders the streets of Paris muttering an incantation of random words. Some he obsessively conjugates; others trip out of his mouth like a nonsensical nursery rhyme. His voice curls around them precisely, though there…
There have been a few tweets comparing Workforce to Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, and they’re not wrong. No, it’s not the high-octane barnburner that Bong’s film is, nor does it juggle as many tonal contours. David Zonana’s film is more sedate and realist in nature, though it does tackle similar themes like the bitterness of class warfare,…
Dickens enthusiasts can breathe a sigh of relief: Armando Iannucci has not turned their beloved novel into an R-rated barrage of f-bombs, a trait which has so defined his filmmaking career that one of the audience members at my screening referred to it as making “symphony from swears.” This is his family-friendly gift to the…
The premise here is certainly promising: a dangerous synthetic drug that takes lives in an unusual way, altering users’ biological makeup so much that they literally fall back in time and die at the hands of whatever they find there. This also felt like a good opportunity to comment on the ongoing opioid epidemic in…
I do not know exactly why the main character in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s To the Ends of the Earth sings the Japanese version of Édith Piaf’s “L’hymne à l’amour” not once, but twice, though I can venture a good guess. Yoko (Atsuko Maeda) professes late into the film that her dream career is to be a singer…
In a sea of space-related stories being released this year, Proxima stands solemnly alone, more content to dramatize the internal turmoil of the preparation process than carve an insurmountable hole in its budget for a lot of realistic special effects. In a way, this is refreshing. The intense training it takes for would-be astronauts to…
The newly-minted Platform Prize winner out of TIFF (which comes with a cool $20,000 payday) is Pietro Marcello’s stylish adaptation of Jack London’s 1909 novel Martin Eden, a work that has fallen into relative obscurity in North America but continues to be taught and read in Europe. For those unfamiliar with the book, it is…
Helen Reddy is no longer a household name for the current generation, but for baby boomers in the 1970s she was a feminist icon after her hit single “I Am Woman” was co-opted by the women’s liberation movement as its unofficial anthem. It is a cheesy song by today’s standards, with lyrics referring to birthing…
The uniquely absurd and painterly vision of Roy Andersson is unlike any other in contemporary cinema, so it is always an event when the director brings out a new work to share with neophytes and admirers alike. About Endlessness (which recently netted him the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival) is, much like his…
The sibyls of Ancient Greece foretold prophesies and supposedly had intimate connections with the deities, with most of those deities hailing from the underworld. Justine Triet’s protagonist Sibyl could be seen in similar terms. She is, after all, a psychotherapist whose “prophesies” are rooted in psychology rather than spirituality, but she is still closely linked…
A spiritual sequel of sorts to her 2016 documentary We Can’t Make the Same Mistake Twice, celebrated First Nations filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin once again delves into the contested issues of healthcare and welfare pertaining to Canada’s Indigenous children with Jordan River Anderson, the Messenger. Despite a modest runtime of 65 minutes, Obomsawin is able to…
Hirokazu Kore-eda broke his long tradition of attending TIFF premieres last year for Shoplifters because he was busy preparing The Truth—his first film made and set outside of Japan, with an international cast that includes screen titans Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche and Ethan Hawke. A recipe, by all accounts, for success after his Palme d’Or glory. And…
The original title of the Owen-McCafferty penned Ordinary Love was Normal People, but because a Sally Rooney novel utilized the same title last year, it had to be changed. Nevertheless, the kernel of McCafferty’s truth can be found in these title choices. This film chronicles a couple you would encounter on a daily walk, or on…
