VIFF Review: Faces Places

To read previous VIFF coverage, click here. Faces Places (or in French: Visages Villages) comes equipped with so much detailed history and deeply embedded feeling between its characters that the winsomeness and tragedy almost writes itself. Equally the result of…

VIFF Review: Thelma

To read previous VIFF coverage, click here. Coming out of Norway, Joachim Trier’s newest film may be perhaps the most hallucinatory and lecherous romantic vision put to screen this year, and with its genuine sense of character beneath the macabre,…

Annabelle: Creation Movie Review

The upsurge of horror in recent years (both in independent and major studios) has been crucial to the development of the genre, not just as an exercise in pure terror, but in the conversion of big studio projects into individual visions.…

Movie Review: The Student

The Student, a tiresome proclamation of Russia’s growing fears of religious fundamentalism, feels about as cynically detached as these kinds of films are expected to be. It tells the story of a teen who turns into a Christian ultraist, altering his school’s…

Movie Review: The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki

The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki (shot in classical black-and-white) recalls the old down-and-out boxer stories that enchanted old Hollywood. The myth of uneducated and unsophisticated vagrants, blessed only with the talent of giving and taking a beating,…

Teen Titans: The Judas Contract Trailer

Fans of DC were treated to Justice League Dark dropping on home video this week, and hot off its heels is the trailer for the next feature-length animated film. Fans of DC’s younger heroes are in for a treat as…

Movie Review: The King

No two words coalesce into satire the way capitalism and hedonism do, the two ideas have been appropriated by filmmakers for decades but it wasn’t until Martin Scorsese’s bacchanalian epic The Wolf of Wall Street (now a high-flown and completely misguided…