CABLE | Burning Down the 'House of the Dragon' – HBO Season 2

"Make it a son for a son."

1:26 Pictures Inc. / Bastard Sword

HBO's long-awaited sophomore season of its blockbuster Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon, set nearly two centuries prior, during the thick of the beginning of the fall of House Targaryen's legendary three-hundred-year reign over the Seven Kingdoms, moves beyond author George R.R. Martin's complex fantasy lore. Adapted from the fictional in-universe history book, Fire & Blood, it's meant to fill in the backstory of the still unfinished A Song of Ice and Fire novels.

VIFF 2023 | Repaving 'Union Street' – Vancouver's Black History

"African essence is brighter than any diamond."

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2023—Kenyan-Canadian actress/screenwriter Jamila Pomeroy directs the joyful new Telus documentary Union Street (her feature-length debut) about Vancouver's forgotten (or more accurately, erased) legacy of its historical Black residents displaced from the area known as Hogan's Alley in the Chinatown and Strathcona neighbourhoods.

SCREEN | Lily Gladstone Discovers 'The Unknown Country'

"Just kinda floatin'."

Music Box Films / Cold Iron Pictures

Acclaimed Native American actress Lily Gladstone (also a co-writer) stars in the moving cross-country road trip indie drama The Unknown Country. Visual artist turned filmmaker Morrisa Maltz crafts an unconventional film telling all the little stories of the lives of strangers you meet along your travels, as Gladstone's Tana reconnects with her extended family while mourning the loss of her grandma.

SCREEN | Devery Jacobs Finds 'This Place' x VQFF 2023

"Disappearing feels good sometimes."

Vancouver Queer Film Festival

Mohawk actress Devery Jacobs (originally from Kahnawà:ke Territory outside of Montreal) stars as a mixed-race Indigenous-Iranian student in the moving queer romantic drama This Place. Set in Toronto, freshman director V.T. Nayani tells parallel stories of daughters of refugees dealing with the ghosts of absent fathers set against Canada's history of both settling and displacing its inhabitants.

SCREEN | Jon Hamm Finds A 'Corner Office' x WFF 2022

"A smile disarms your opponent."

Whistler Film Festival

Filmed in Vancouver, commercial filmmaker Joachim Back directs a moustached Jon Hamm, who also narrates, in the surrealist workplace satire Corner Office, based on the acclaimed Kafkaesque novel The Room by Swedish author/actor Jonas Karlsson. When Hamm's corporate paper pusher, Orson, finds a secret door to a lavish (possibly magical) room no one else can see, his behaviour starts to go off the rails in the eyes of his colleagues.

GENRE | Margaret Qualley Sells 'Sanctuary' x WFF 2022

"It's because you're a pervert."

Whistler Film Festival

New York indie filmmaker Zachary Wigon directs a chillingly unpredictable two-hander of a psychological thriller starring Margaret Qualley and Christopher Abbott as an unconventional dominatrix blackmailing her insecure hotel empire heir client in Sanctuary. Set during an emotionally intense session, the charismatic pair go back and forth sublimely in a twisty roleplay that goes beyond its stage-like theatrical setting.

REEL | Top 10 Films of 2023 So Far

Each film reviewed where linked below:

1) Past Lives (dir. Celine Song)

2) Return to Seoul (dir. Davy Chou)

3) Asteroid City (dir. Wes Anderson)

4) Showing Up (dir. Kelly Reichardt)

5) Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. (dir. Kelly Fremon Craig)

6) BlackBerry (dir. Matt Johnson)

7) How to Blow Up A Pipeline (dir. Daniel Goldhaber)

8) You Hurt My Feelings (dir. Nicole Holofcener)

9) A Thousand and One (dir. A.V. Rockwell)

10) Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (dirs. Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers & Justin K. Thompson)

SCREEN | Self-Reflections on 'Beba' x DOXA 2023

"Violence lives in my DNA."

DOXA Documentary Film Festival

First-time filmmaker Rebeca Huntt chronicles her own life and racial identity in the striking coming-of-age, cinematic self-portrait Beba. Her intimate documentary interrogates Huntt's own family history as a series of introspective visual memories recalling her childhood growing up in New York City as an Afro-Latina.

SCREEN | 'Big Fight in Little Chinatown' Finds Trouble x DOXA 2023

"Chinatown is a nesting place of living heritage."

DOXA Documentary Film Festival

Montreal-based filmmaker Karen Cho documents the battle for the soul of various fading Chinatowns across major North American cities—including Vancouver's. Big Fight in Little Chinatown tackles the disappearances of these historical neighbourhoods amidst the fervent anti-Asian racism that accelerated during the global pandemic.

SCREEN | Michelle Williams Sculpts A Comedy – 'Showing Up'

"Go die somewhere else."

A24 / Sphere Films

Celebrated filmmaker Kelly Reichardt reteams with frequent collaborator Michelle Williams (in their fourth film together) for a quietly moving, minimalist indie comedy set in the art world. Showing Up follows Williams' understated Lizzy, a frustrated sculptor working as an arts administrator at the now-closed Oregon College of Art and Craft (OCAD), trying to make art while constantly being interrupted by life's mundane circumstances.

SCREEN | 'How to Blow Up A Pipeline' Sabotages x TIFF 2022

"You're an orphan now. It's like origin story sh*t."

Toronto International Film Festival

How to Blow Up A Pipeline, directed by indie filmmaker Daniel Goldhaber, adapts Swedish academic Andreas Malm's non-fiction climate activist book about ecological sabotage into a gripping contemporary heist thriller. Set in the vast oil fields of West Texas, the film's radical message of driving active change through destruction and property damage frames an intriguing narrative hook of justifiable eco-terrorism for the greater good to save humanity from ourselves.

SCREEN | 'Until Branches Bend' Invades the Okanagan x SXSW 2023

"Peaches just rot."

SXSW Film & TV Festival

Vancouver-based production designer turned director Sophie Jarvis explores small-town drama in her captivating debut feature, Until Branches Bend. Filmed in and around Penticton on 16mm, the low-budget film shows Okanagan life through communal tensions as a result of looming oncoming invasions.

GENRE | Ghostface Takes Manhattan – Slashing 'Scream VI'

"F*ck this franchise!"

Paramount Pictures / Spyglass Media Group

Scream 5 directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett return for the fast-tracked direct sequel to their successful, self-described "requel". Scream VI escapes Wesboro for New York City in a brutal, entertaining, but excessive slasher follow-up that stretches the limits of its horror franchise building.

SCREEN | 'Return to Seoul' Searching x TIFF 2022

"Sorrow is the way of Korean men."

Toronto International Film Festival

Cambodian-French filmmaker Davy Chou explores the internal complexities of foreign adoption in the splendid French-Korean drama Return to Seoul (aka Retour à Séoul or All the People I'll Never Be). It captures a surprisingly joyous and recklessly transformative journey of a young woman's diasporic anguish.

SCREEN | Seducing 'Midnight at the Paradise' x WFF 2022

"Every relationship requires a healthy dose of delusion."

Whistler Film Festival

Toronto-based Japanese-Canadian actress Vanessa Matsui makes her feature directorial debut in the infidelity drama, Midnight at the Paradise. Her film focuses on the relationship between two interracial couples who collide over the course of a night of sexual chemistry and delusion when an encounter outside the titular Paradise Theatre reignites old sparks.

VIFF 2022 | Léa Seydoux Awakens 'One Fine Morning'

"How could a body like yours have remained asleep for so long?"

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2022—French auteur Mia Hansen-Løve crafts another heartbreakingly real yet breezy romantic drama. Starring Léa Seydoux as a young widowed single mother, the partially autobiographical One Fine Morning (aka Un beau matin) tells a bittersweet, slice-of-life Parisian tale revolving around a passionate extramarital affair.

SCREEN | Anna Kendrick Controls 'Alice, Darling' x WFF 2022

"He wouldn't love me if he knew how bad I am."

Whistler Film Festival

Anna Kendrick stars in British actress-turned-director Mary Nighy's disquieting relationship drama Alice, Darling. Kendrick gives a gripping yet restrained performance as the titular young woman struggling to leave her emotionally abusive and controlling boyfriend (Charlie Carrick) after he expertly manipulates their toxic co-dependency.

SCREEN | Mother vs. Son – 'When You Finish Saving the World'

"Everyone around me is a narcissist."

A24 / Sphere Films

Acclaimed actor/playwright Jesse Eisenberg makes his screenwriting and directorial debut in the indie coming-of-age cringefest, When You Finish Saving the World, based on his 2020 audio drama of the same name. Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard star sublimely as a high-strung do-gooder mother and her self-involved teenage consumerist son with a contentious relationship due to their generational divide and shared tendencies of oblivious narcissism.

GENRE | Hayley Law Traps 'Door Mouse' – Stylish Neo-Noir Pulp

"It was a full pack of cigarettes type of night."

Gravitas Ventures / Elevation Pictures

Vancouver native Hayley Law stars in fellow local actor turned filmmaker Avan Jogia's stylish debut feature behind the camera in an indie neo-noir dripping with contemporary pulp. Door Mouse mines gumshoe detective genre fare with a modern gloss (not unlike the 2005 film Brick) for a rather oddball mystery genre effort.

SCREEN | Gillian Jacobs Finds 'The Seven Faces of Jane'

"Everyone struggles to find a version of themselves that they like."

Gravitas Ventures

The Seven Faces of Jane, an experimental anthology indie road film conceived by producer Roman Coppola as an "exquisite corpse" blind collaboration starring Gillian Jacobs as the eponymous heroine, is a surrealist vision of a woman tumbling through eight different strange mini-adventures. It's an odd but often emotional series of small character pieces.