When Downton Abbey ended its television run in 2015, there was no question it would return in some capacity. It was not a question of “if”—it was a question of “when.” Now fans have their chance to revisit the Crawley household after a four-year absence, everyone and everything looking mostly the same in 1927, when the action…
I find it difficult to be too hard on a film that is so irrevocably buoyed by its lead performance, and such is the case with Judy, a film which wouldn’t have passed muster without its star. For, admittedly, there is a lot here that I found lacking, all of which still bring down the film’s…
As someone who is plus-sized in the way Brittany (Jillian Bell) is, I do appreciate a film like this coming along and contending with the inherent messiness of body positivity, particularly the idea of being happy with your image while also recognizing that losing weight is important for your longevity. Cognitively, there is a dissonance…
I was not originally planning to see Joker during the festival, but when it won the Golden Lion in Venice, I was curious. No doubt many other critics were, too. And so it was that we all dragged ourselves to one of the two concurrent press screenings of the film on a Tuesday morning, wondering…
It’s 2019 and a new lesbian romance has set hearts alight—and cooled many others. Quite reminiscent of the critical discourse that surrounded Todd Haynes’ Carol in 2015, Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire has evoked passionate reactions from the majority of film critics who have seen it, while its naysayers have largely sung the same…
Kleber Mendonça Filho is one of the most exciting filmmakers working today—and Bacurau is only his third feature. Despite his minimal output thus far, I do believe I’m right in saying so. His debut, Neighboring Sounds, is a remarkably lived-in tapestry of a working-class neighbourhood in the grips of a heatwave, while Aquarius is a decade-spanning rumination on…
I can understand Waves at a conceptual level, but try as I might, I can’t take to its concrete, finished form. Beyond the audaciousness of slamming us right into the high-maintenance world of high school wrestler Tyler (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), the various methods Shults employs to depict his demanding routine, secretive love life, and eventual breakdown—whether…
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…
