SCREEN | St. Vincent Tours 'The Nowhere Inn'

"Your life isn't crazy or interesting enough to make a documentary about."

IFC Films / Topic Studios

Musician Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent) and fellow singer/actress Carrie Brownstein, both playing themselves, offer a fictionalized attempt at documenting Clark's career in the Lynchian music mockumentary, The Nowhere Inn. Structured like a typical rock documentary following an artist on tour, the very much scripted film (co-written by the duo) blends together concert footage with fake behind-the-scenes sequences and talking-head interviews as supposedly helmed by Brownstein who stands in as the director of the film-within-a-film.

GENRE | Rebecca Hall Haunts 'The Night House' x Fantasia 2021

"Come back to me."

Fantasia International Film Festival

Rebecca Hall battles her demons as a recently widowed schoolteacher in director David Bruckner's psychological horror film about coping with loneliness. The Night House turns its grief-stricken protagonist into a device for depicting some truly frightening jump scares while teasing supernatural elements in line with the haunted house genre.

SCREEN | Winston Duke Reflects Over 'Nine Days'

"You are being considered for the amazing opportunity of life."

Sony Pictures Classics / Mongrel Media

Japanese-Brazilian filmmaker Edson Oda makes his feature debut in the sort of (pre-)existential drama, Nine Days. Winston Duke stars as an arbiter (Will) who judges a soul's worth before deciding who gets to move on to become born and live life on Earth. It's a novel high-concept conceptualized through lo-fi technology like VCRs and VHS tapes in a play-like single-location setting of what appears to be somewhere in the middle of a desert in a transitional plane of existence in the great beyond.

GENRE | 'Zola' Tells A Sordid Tale of Sex Trafficking

"P*ssy is worth thousands, bitch!"

A24 / VVS Films

Indie director Janicza Bravo adapts the gonzo, wild, and partially true story of strippers road tripping down to Florida, then getting in all kinds of trouble based on the 2015 real-life viral Twitter thread (148 tweets-long) recounted by A'Ziah "Zola" King, who also narrates the surreal film. The stylish Zola recreates the experience of telling a story through social media with internet language embedded into its filmmaking techniques.

GENRE | Silent Thrills – Emily Blunt Finds 'A Quiet Place Part II'

"You can't stay."

Paramount Pictures / Platinum Dunes

Originally scheduled to be released theatrically in March of last year, actor/director John Krasinski follows up his surprise 2018 silent horror hit with a worthy enough, if substantially rehashed, sequel, trying to recreate the same tense thrills on screen in A Quiet Place Part II. Once again, Krasinski's both real-life and on-screen wife Emily Blunt is the main draw with her visceral, maternal, and towering emotional performance.

GENRE | Middling Despair – Marrying 'The Killing of Two Lovers'

"You need to fight for us."

Neon / Elevation Pictures

Writer/director Robert Machoian's riveting psychological drama is one of the more creative uses of a film's title in eliciting dramatic tension, possibly ever. The meticulously brooding The Killing of Two Lovers is irresistibly taut and thrilling despite its mostly very ordinary domestic material about marital strife and a desperate man struggling to keep his family together.

GETAWAY | Sea to Sky x Fergie's Cafe x Sunwolf x Squamish

Squamish—Late last summer, on a somewhat random but much-needed mid-week break of a day trip, we travelled nearby to enjoy a scenic brunch meal from the popular but secluded Fergie's Cafe (reopened after a devastating fire) located on the Sunwolf Riverside Resort cabin grounds in the neighbouring town of Brackendale.

SCREEN | Sebastian Stan Parties Through 'Monday'

"Thank you for not being an asshole."

IFC Films / Protagonist Pictures

Greek filmmaker Argyris Papadimitropoulos channels a pure sense of destructive yet joyful energy in his sexy indie romance. Essentially a loose European party film, Monday chronicles the long-term aftermath of a seemingly random summer weekend of debaucherous partying across various Greek islands.

REEL | 93rd Annual Oscars x 2020/21 Ballot

Picture: Nomadland
Director: Chloé Zhao, Nomadland
Actor: Chadwick Boseman, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (Winner: Anthony Hopkins, The Father)
Actress: Carey Mulligan, Promising Young Woman (Winner: Frances McDormand, Nomadland)
Supporting Actor: Daniel Kaluuya, Judas and the Black Messiah
Supporting Actress: Youn Yuh-jung, Minari
Original Screenplay: Emerald Fennell, Promising Young Woman
Adapted Screenplay: Chloé Zhao, Nomadland (Winner: Christopher Hampton & Florian Zeller, The Father)
Animated Feature: Soul

SCREEN | Idris Elba Rides the Pavement – 'Concrete Cowboy'

"Only home I ever known was the back of a horse."

Waxylu Films

Star Idris Elba (also a producer) dives into the Black urban cowboy subculture in Northern Philidelphia inspired by the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club, based on the young adult novel Ghetto Cowboy written by author Greg Neri, in first-time director Ricky Staub's soulful film adaptation. Co-starring Caleb McLaughlin as the estranged, troubled teenage son (Cole) from Detroit of Elba's Harp who's sent to live with him, Concrete Cowboy tells a familiar father/son tale of African-American parenthood told through a sort of contemporary western lens.

SCREEN | Rachel Sennott Sleeps Around – Sitting 'Shiva Baby'

"Such nice girls."

Utopia / Pacific Northwest Pictures

Jewish-Canadian writer/director Emma Seligman (a Toronto native) makes her feature filmmaking debut with the clever indie comedy, Shiva Baby, adapted from her 2018 short film. Starring Rachel Sennott as an aimless bisexual college senior moonlighting as a sex worker, Danielle, the film quickly becomes a sort of chaotic screwball farce set at a titular Jewish ceremonial family gathering when she runs into her sugar daddy whom she realizes her parents know.

SCREEN | Anthony Hopkins Remembers 'The Father'

"There's something funny going on."

Sony Pictures Classics / Elevation Pictures

French playwright turned first-time director Florian Zeller adapts his own award-winning stage play Le Père with a fine British cast in The Father. Starring Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman as an aging but posh elderly Londoner and his frustrated but caring middle-aged daughter, there's more than a heartbreaking yet elliptical quality to its dramatization of a family struggling with the affliction of dementia in a parent.

SCREEN | Witnessing '76 Days' Locked Down in Wuhan

"I will never forget."

MTV Documentary Films

76 Days, a very stark but stunning documentary about the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, captures the obstacles against human resilience in the quickly escalating battle to contain the spread of the coronavirus disease at Wuhan Red Cross Hospital in China. Directed by New York-based Chinese-American filmmaker Hao Wu from Weixi Chen and an anonymous third director who gathered the harrowing frontline footage featured, the stripped-down film is almost unbelievable in its immediacy and intimacy.

SCREEN | Rosamund Pike Steals 'I Care A Lot'

"Me? I'm just someone who cares."

STX Films / Black Bear Pictures

Rosamund Pike is absolutely savage as a swindling "legal guardian" for defenceless wealthy senior citizens in British writer/director J Blakeson's sleek dark comedy noir about hustlers and elder abuse, I Care A Lot. Pike's Marla is a ruthless conservator embodying the essence of our current state of widespread scammer culture.

SCREEN | Sujata Day Spells Trouble – 'Definition Please'

Array

Insecure alum Sujata Day makes her feature directorial debut with an endearing film about family and stalled adulthood in Definition Please. Framed around a former child national spelling bee champion struggling to grow up and live up to her full potential as an adult, Day, who stars as twenty-something Monica, weaves issues of South Asian values and anxieties through her appealing indie dramedy.

REEL | Black (Power) History Month – 'Judas and the Black Messiah'

"You can't murder liberation!"

Warner Bros. Pictures / Macro Media

Director Shaka King heads back to 1960s Chicago for his biographical drama of betrayal, Judas and the Black Messiah. Starring Daniel Kaluuya and Lakeith Stanfield as chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, Fred Hampton, and FBI informant William O'Neal, both are absolutely electrifying in their magnetic portrayals of key African-American figures brought down by white supremacist structures of the FBI.

REEL | Steven Yeun Finds His American Dream – 'Minari'

"Grandma smells like Korea."

A24 / Elevation Pictures

Korean-American filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung (no relation) has made a startlingly moving and quietly emotional semi-autobiographical immigrant story set on a rural farm in 1980s Arkansas. Starring Steven Yeun (Chung's cousin by marriage) as a version of the writer/director's own farmer father, Minari tells a wondrously intimate tale of assimilating to the American Dream.

REEL | A 'Promising Young Woman' Gets Her Revenge

"That is just asking for it."

Focus Features / LuckyChap Entertainment

British actress and filmmaker Emerald Fennell, who recently played Camila Parker Bowles in The Crown in addition to showrunning season two of Killing Eve, makes her feature directorial debut with a twisted dark comedy revenge thriller with a deceptively bright bubblegum pop gloss to it. Starring Carey Mulligan as a contemporary femme fatale, Promising Young Woman is all about an underestimated bombshell in disguise exacting her own form of disturbing vigilante justice against would-be male rapists.

SCREEN | Vanessa Kirby Breaks Apart – 'Pieces of a Woman'

"She got it gray like her soul. That's her spirit colour."

Little Lamb / Bron Studios

British actress Vanessa Kirby gives a career-best performance as an expectant mother turned grieving one in Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó's messy tragedy piece, Pieces of a Woman. Despite the tour-de-force acting and high sense of tense melodrama, the intimate film folds parental suffering into a basic melange of circumstantial grief and dramatized trauma.

SCREEN | In the Mood for 'Sylvie's Love' on Prime Video

"I can't be the woman of your dreams while also trying to be the woman of my own."

Amazon Studios

An always lovely Tessa Thompson gives another sensational performance in a good ol’ fashioned star-crossed period romance in the traditional Hollywood melodrama mould. How writer/director Eugene Ashe expresses the purity of 1950s Black love feels just as warm as it is endearing in the sumptuous Sylvie's Love.