Honour Keeper is yet another CIFF discovery – a delicate flower of a film by a first time director that unfolds to reveal itself in its own time and its own way. First time feature director/writer Pushpendra Singh has taken a Rajathani folk tale and placed in a setting that could be mistaken for centuries ago, […]
Category: Movie Reviews
CIFF Review: Little Spartan!
Little Spartan is a strange little film from first-time director Dragos-Bogdan Iuga, who also scripted. It is a film that shot over sixteen years (talk about ambitious!) as Iuga follows the life of millionaire/billionaire (both terms are used in the film) little person Gabriel Dita. Ostensibly, it is about the efforts of Gabi to make a fictionalized […]
CIFF Review: Backcountry: The Horrors of Nature!
Brad and Jenn are off on a long weekend of enjoying nature – he’s taking her to see a treasured spot from his past – when they unwittingly encroach on the territory of black bear. Based on a true story, Backcountry is Canadian director Adam MacDonald’s first feature. If quality counts, it won’t be his […]
CIFF Review: Heaven Adores You!
Documentaries about musical icons tend to be either too worshipful, or too determined to find the warts part of a warts and all biography. Heaven Adores You looks at the late Elliott Smith and his music in a way that, while it leans a tiny bit toward the former, doesn’t hesitate to include Smith’s flaws. […]
CIFF Review: Li’l Quinquin – Absurdist Comedy From 2-Time Cannes Grand Prix Winner!
Bruno Dumont won the Cannes Grand Prix twice – for dramas Flanders and Humanité – so of course his next film would be a 197-minute absurdist comedy about a Gallic Dennis The Menace and a series of brutal murders in a small French coastal town.
CIFF Review: Project M (Projet-M) – Micro-Budget, Gravity Class!
One of the best movies I’ve seen this year is a French-Canadian sci-fi movie called Project M (Projet-M) – shot for about the cost of a small house and originally set up as a web series. Four astronauts on a 1,000-day mission aboard a space station find themselves at a loss when, 900 days in, […]
CIFF Review: God Help the Girl Is Beyond Twee – And That’s Good!
The CIFF screening of God Help the Girl was the Canadian Premiere – it won the Special Jury Prize, world cinema at Sundance earlier this year. It’s the story a girl recovering from an eating disorder who runs away from a psychiatric hospital and forms a pop band with two new friends. It’s the first […]
A Walk Among The Tombstones – Dark, Creepy, Pulpy Noir!
Ex-cop Matt Scudder operates as an unlicensed PI – he does people favors and they give him gifts. When a pair of killers start kidnapping and killing the loved ones of New York drug dealers, Scudder is asked to find them and take one of the victims’ husbands to them so that he might take […]
The Maze Runner – Everything Is Going To Change!
A young man named Thomas wakes up to find himself in an elevator rising to a wild green space and a host of other young men who, like him cannot remember anything about their pasts save for their names. The space is surrounded by titanic walls which open into a maze but no one has […]
This Is Where I Leave You – August Osage County The Good Version!
This Is Where I Leave You finds four siblings reuniting with their mother for their father’s funeral. The mother insists they sit shiva for him – which means seven days of dysfunction. It’s a plot we’ve seen quite a bit in the last year, but thanks to a terrific cast and surprisingly nuanced direction from […]
The Drop: James Gandolfini’s Fine Finale; Tom Hardy’s Best Yet!
If you see a gun in the first act of a movie, it must go off in the third. I’m paraphrasing there, The Drop does in fact show you a gun in the first act – more than one, actually – and, from there, the movie moves implacably to its inevitable, yet not quite expected […]