As a whole, the Canadian War Witch is an extremely solid, sobering account of a teenager’s descent to hell during a civil war in an unspecified African nation, made with extremely clear-eyed restraint from harangues, sentiment, message-mongering, or anything else that would cheapen its central character’s suffering and fight. That this still qualifies as a […]
Hey everyone, let’s play a fun game I invented, called “Being Jessica Chastain”. Pretend it’s late 2011, and you are a 34-year-old actress who has gone from complete anonymity to ubiquity in the blink of an eye. You’ve already been in the year’s best-reviewed art film, and you’re one of the most-praised members of the […]
Writer-director Sarah Polley’s Away from Her was one of the very finest feature debuts of the 2000s, the sort of brilliant that makes it virtually impossible not to eagerly await everything she ever does in the future. Even when her follow-up is such a sophomore movie: not that Take This Waltz is at all a […]
My dear readers, who stick with me through all the weird, nasty, stupid places I take this blog, can any of you think of a better way to mark my 31st birthday than with an unnecessarily long Canadian slasher movie that also turned 31 this year? Of course you cannot, because there is NO BETTER […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/19 & 10/20 Winner of the Gold Hugo in the After Dark Competition World premiere: 19 May, 2012, Cannes Film Festival Speaking completely privately, you understand, but if my father was a remarkably famous film director; and if my remarkably famous father was moreover famous primarily for one very specific and relatively […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/17 & 10/20World premiere: 21 April, 2012, Tribeca Film Festival If you had asked me, in the late 1990s, if I had ever expected to feel sorry for Selma Blair, I would literally not have understood what you meant. So for that, I owe In Their Skin (which has previously done time […]
It’s probably better not to presume that one is smarter than David Cronenberg. This has been my constant thought ever since walking out of Cosmopolis, which is in keeping with that director’s career insofar as it is bizarre as all hell, and part of what makes it bizarre is that I’m pretty much definitely certain […]
As you may know, the Academy Awards nominees for Best Foreign Language film get chosen by two groups: the old conservative group that enjoys simple morality plays, crusty grandpas, and dew-eyed children, and the edgy, smart group that was introduced in the 2000s specifically to make sure that at least some of the nominees are […]
Hobo with a Shotgun is deliberately meant to be a bad movie. The reason that I know this is that the film is incredibly eager to remind me over and over again, of this fact. And that is why I’m almost tempted to say that it’s bad. I mean, it is bad, but it’s not […]
Welcome, friends, to the Year of Blood! For the next twelve months, we’ll be exploring the world of horror films with that special seasonal flair: a mere sampling of the many, many films that take place on a holiday or other special event. Happy New Year, everybody, and here’s to a fun, death-filled 2012! The […]
The party line on A Dangerous Method is that it is more of a period piece – and a sort of biopic to boot – than it is a David Cronenberg picture, and that whatever its relative success or failures, we’d all be better off with a little bit more heads exploding and nightmare gynecology, […]
The creators: Writer/director Glen Morgan, who was in his day one-half of the writing team responsible for some of the finest episodes of the early seasons of The X-Files. 2006 was not his day. (His writing partner, James Wong, is on hand as producer). The plot: First, that viewer which looks for more of the […]
