Review: “Sugarcane”

In 2021, numerous unmarked graves were discovered on the grounds of St. Joseph’s Mission, a former Canadian residential school situated near the Sugarcane Indian Reserve near Williams Lake in British Columbia. This wasn’t the only school where such a discovery was made. It is, however, where directors Julian Brave Noisecat and Emily Kassie choose to […]

Review: “Wicked”

Jon M. Chu’s 2021 film adaptation of the Broadway musical In the Heights made me suspect that he wasn’t a particularly skilled director of musicals. His long-gestating film adaptation of Wicked confirmed it. It’s a shame, because even more so than Heights, there’s a legitimately great movie musical rocking around inside that two hour and […]

Review: “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat”

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat— Johan Grimonprez’s documentary tracking the events leading up to the 1961 assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba that’s comprised entirely of archival footage and audio and text excerpts from a wide range of sources and first-hand accounts— opens at the close. Text rippling across the screen illustrate the dialogue between […]

Review: “Memoir of a Snail”

If there’s one person who has experience with just about every seemingly good thing that life throws at you blowing up in your face, it’s me. So maybe that’s why I became so strongly wrapped up in the story of Memoir of a Snail, even as its tugging of its protagonist from terrible life event […]

Review: “Joker Folie à deux”

Joker Folie à deux opens with the sort of stylishly vacuous sequence director Todd Phillips is so great at realizing: an animated short modeled after Warner Brothers’ vintage Looney Tunes cartoons starring Joker— the psychopathic clown with a sadistic sense of humor, most known for existing as the arch villain to DC Comics’ superhero Batman— […]

Fantastic Fest Review: “The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee”

“On the seventh of June in the year 2015 I passed away at the age of 93. By then I had become quite accustomed to dying.” Christopher Lee rises from the grave to narrate a documentary about his own life in Jon Spira’s The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee. That statement, uttered at the […]

Review: “Sleep”

The scary part is the lack of control. When you’re asleep, anything can happen. Your mind can dream up things wonderful and terrible. You can talk out loud. You can get up and move and walk with zero conscious control over your limbs. Recently, I fell asleep at my desk while working on a job […]

Fantastic Fest Dispatch: “What Happened to Dorothy Bell?”, “The Draft!”, “Ghost Killer”

Ghosts and supernatural entities are common threads weaving together these three films that premiered at Fantastic Fest 2024— the annual festival in Austin, Texas highlighting genre films— but those horror trappings also give way to character studies that are accomplished with varying degrees of success. Read on for my reviews of the found footage horror […]

TIFF Review: “Querido Trópico”

Fractured mother/daughter relationships make ripe stories for some of the most compelling cinema, even when they are versions of the same tale we’ve seen time and time again. That statement certainly applies to Querido Trópico (Beloved Tropic), a Panamanian drama that is the first narrative feature from director Ana Endara (who has four feature-length documentaries […]

Review: “Close Your Eyes”

Close Your Eyes is Victor Erice’s old man movie, but it feels reductive to say so. It’s also his love letter to cinema, but that is an even more inadequate attribution. After all, all of the filmmaker’s works, scattered as they have been over the decades, celebrate cinematic magic in some fashion. In The Spirit […]