CINEMA | Viola Davis Devours 'Widows'

"No one thinks we have the balls to pull this off."

Acclaimed filmmaker Steve McQueen's latest sprawling feature is certainly a lot of movie. Ostensibly, a heist film with more than a few clear twists on the genre, Widows is a first-rate crime thriller packed with strong character performances throughout.

VIEW | Blending Mixed Media and Drama – 'For Izzy' x VAFF 2018

Asian-American filmmaker Alex Chu uses documentary-style footage, still photography, poetry, and animation to dramatize For Izzy. Through the recovery a queer photojournalist from opioid addiction, we follow how two Chinese families break out of her insular lives. Ostensibly a blended family drama, Chu uses creative mixed media to fully represent the emotional journey of his flawed but endearing characters.

VIEW | Finishing 'The Other Side of the Wind' on Netflix

"Movies and friendship... those are mysteries."

Filmed perpetually throughout the 1970s and long thought to be his lost unfinished masterpiece, legendary filmmaker Orson Welles' finally released The Other Side of the Wind is truly a strange but intriguing piece of art that endlessly comments on the two-faced nature of Hollywood.

FEAST | Miku Restaurant x 10th Anniversary x Waterfront

10 Years of Miku

Waterfront—(October 12, 2018) Last month, Aburi Restaurants celebrated the tenth-anniversary of its flagship restaurant Miku Restaurant with a special six-course kaiseki tasting menu that reflected its notable history of Japanese culinary excellence in Vancouver.

CINEMA | Rami Malek Upstages 'Bohemian Rhapsody'

"There's only room in this band for one hysterical queen."

Bohemian Rhapsody, the fast and loose musical biopic of singer Freddie Mercury and the band Queen's meteoric rise, plays like a revisionist vision of the musical group's history thanks to bandmates Brian May and Roger Taylor's strong involvement. As explored in the film, the group was so groundbreaking and original yet this film feels so overly familiar and many parts could have been about any band and not the singular, unique entity that was Queen.

GENRE | Jonah Hill Remembers the 'Mid90s' Fondly

Actor turned first-time filmmaker Jonah Hill really shows his reverence for west coast skateboarding culture of the 1990s. Hill's film is such a carefully constructed time capsule of youth. Full of deeply authentic touches, Mid90s is such a loving portrait of adolescent bonding and a sense of longing to belong.

VIFF 2018 | Nicole Kidman Solves 'Destroyer'

VIFF 2018—Karyn Kusama's latest film feels like almost a parody of the gritty Los Angeles cop movie genre with all the usual hard-boiled clichés. Destroyer stars a very unconventional and deglamorized Nicole Kidman as both the younger, naïve undercover agent and very dishevelled, damaged older versions of her LAPD Detective Erin Bell.