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 longing to belong.

VIFF 2018 | Marrying 'The Third Wife'

VIFF 2018—First-time filmmaker Nguyễn Phương Anh (aka Ash Mayfair) tells the historical drama of a fourteen-year-old child bride of a wealthy landowner in 19th century rural Vietnam. The Third Wife sorrowfully transports us to the repressive period full of sensuous colours to express a pervasive feeling of melancholy.

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.

CINEMA | Ryan Gosling Steps Into 'First Man'

"We need to fail down here so we don’t fail up there."

Academy Award-winning director Damien Chazelle dramatizes astronaut Neil Armstrong using an unconventional, naturalistic docudrama style shot mostly on grainy 16mm film that proves much more immersive and deeply psychological. A very soft-spoken Ryan Gosling seems almost too fitting an understated vessel for the reluctant American hero who was a man of few words and rarely showed his emotions.

VIFF 2018 | Natalie Portman Rocks Out – 'Vox Lux'

VIFF 2018—Actor turned filmmaker Brady Corbet's second feature is easily one of the boldest, most original, and intense films of the year. Essentially two separate musically-tinged stories about one character, Vox Lux is almost an inverse parallel to the conventional Hollywood sheen of A Star is Born in its hyper-stylized, almost sociopathic nature of excess and how artistic messages of hope slowly devolve into pop stardom.

VIFF 2018 | Slow 'Burning' A Mystery

"It's no fun being serious."

VIFF 2018—Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong's very slow burn (pun intended) mystery drama loosely based on Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami's short story "Barn Burning" is a grim arthouse treatise on struggling working-class young men. Burning (aka Beoning) tells its story in supremely unnerving ways with more than a few unexpected but sombre turns.

VIFF 2018 | Joel Edgerton Converts 'Boy Erased'

VIFF 2018—Australian actor/director Joel Edgerton thoughtfully dramatizes Garrard Conley's memoir about his experiences growing up in a fundamentalist Arkansas family and enduring gay conversion therapy. Boy Erased is a moving and earnest portrayal of the struggles in dealing with love and acceptance in conservative American communities.