February 7, 2025

REEL | 'Bring Them Down' Shepherds Revenge x TIFF 2024

"Where there's livestock, there's dead stock."
Nora-Jane Noone Christopher Andrews | Bring Them Down | Mubi
Toronto International Film Festival
First-time writer/director Christopher Andrews makes an assured debut in his tragic Irish revenge drama, Bring Them Down. Told from the points of view of two feuding shepherding families in the remote countryside, the film focuses on the escalation between neighbours from a generational cycle of parental angst, economic uncertainty, and emotional trauma being passed down.

February 3, 2025

CABLE | 'Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man' Spins A New Web

"I truly believe that I have these powers to help people, to protect them."
Hudson Thames Jeff Trammell | Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man | Disney+
Marvel Animation
Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is Marvel Animation's latest all-ages alternate reality spin on the web-slinging superhero with a strong retro artistic style inspired by Jack Kirby's classic two-dimensional hand-drawn visual designs updated through modern 3D computer technology for a cool "moving comic" look and aesthetic.

January 30, 2025

SCREEN | Recollections of a Vietnamese Rebellion – 'New Wave' Culture

"I was chasing a story about a bunch of Vietnamese-American rebels."
Lynda Trang Đài Elizabeth Ai | New Wave
Photo credit | Yudi Echevarria/Angel City Press
Chinese-Vietnamese-American director Elizabeth Ai explores the immigrant experience through music in her fun but meaningful documentary, New Wave. All about the influence of the titular genre of music and its effects on the pop culture of the Vietnamese diaspora emerging from 1980s Southern California, the film takes an interesting approach to dissecting the unspoken collective intergenerational trauma of these children of refugees after the fall of Saigon in 1975.

January 27, 2025

GENRE | Sophie Thatcher Finds Romantic 'Companion'–ship

"The days of you controlling me are over."
Sophie Thatcher Drew Hancock | Companion
New Line Cinema / BoulderLight Pictures
Veteran television writer Drew Hancock makes an impressive feature horror screenwriting and directing debut in his inventive romantic horror-comedy. Companion carefully employs the tech-savvy culture of our digital age as a contemporary breakup metaphor for unhealthy romantic relationships.

January 23, 2025

GENRE | Jude Law Chases Down 'The Order' x TIFF 2024

"You preach racial economics. We live it."
Jude Law Jurnee Smollett Justin Kurzel | The Order | TIFF 2024
Toronto International Film Festival
Australian director Justin Kurzel directs a weary Jude Law as a loner FBI agent hunting the eponymous white supremacist domestic terrorist group active in the Pacific Northwest during the 1980s. Based on the 1989 non-fiction book, The Silent Brotherhood, by Denver journalists Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, The Order dramatizes the atrocities committed by a real-life splinter group of organized racist separatists committed to the violent insurrection of the United States.

January 20, 2025

SCREEN | 'It's All Gonna Break' Collects A Broken Social Scene

"It's really difficult to put that much chaos on stage."
Broken Social Scene | Kevin Drew Brendan Canning Stephen Chung | It's All Gonna Break
Blue Ice Docs / Fathom Film
Influential Toronto indie rock collective Broken Social Scene gets the documentary treatment in It's All Gonna Break, an intimate time capsule aiming to capture the youthful spirt of the underground explosion of musical creativity in the early 2000s thanks to cheap rent and a bunch of talented musicians living near each other.

January 16, 2025

REEL | 'Nickel Boys' Reforms A Sinful Historical Perspective

"We have to be like knights. Checkmate."
Aunjanue Elli-Taylor RaMell Ross | Nickel Boys
Orion Pictures / Warner Bros. Pictures
Photographer turned filmmaker RaMell Ross wondrously dramatizes historical institutional racial violence in Nickel Boys, based on the 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead exploring Florida's highly abusive Dozier School, a barbaric reform school for young Black males, that operated in Florida for 111 years (until 2011) before being revealed to have essentially comitted child enslavement and other atrocities after the discovery of many unmarked graves.

January 13, 2025

REEL | Pamela Anderson Retires 'The Last Showgirl' x WFF 2024

"Las Vegas used to treat us like movie stars."
Brenda Song Gia Coppola | The Last Showgirl | Whistler Film Festival 2024
Whistler Film Festival
Vancouver Island native Pamela Anderson makes her on-screen starring role comeback (after her 2022 Broadway stage debut in Chicago) in third-generation filmmaker Gia Coppola's melodic, working-class Las Vegas indie drama. The Last Showgirl deromanticizes a past collective sense of "old Vegas" and its previously idealized facade of sexy glamour.

January 9, 2025

REEL | Adrien Brody Rebuilds 'The Brutalist' x TIFF 2024

"Go to America and I will follow you."
Guy Pearce Brady Corbet | The Brutalist A24 | TIFF 2024
Toronto International Film Festival
Filmed in the glorious 1950s VistaVision sideways 35mm widescreen format, actor-turned-director Brady Corbet makes his great American cinematic opus in the three-and-a-half hour, decades-spanning (1947-1980) epic. The Brutalist is framed as a post-WWII immigrant tale of staggering architectural ambition and scope extolling both all the opportunities and cruelties European Jews faced coming to America.