As a genre, romantic comedies are rather unloved, if not downright hated. Occasionally commercially successful but rarely critically acclaimed, they are a guilty pleasure, something to you dare not admit to actually liking. Blame the over sentimentality, the rigid commitment to formula but the majority of rom-coms are tired and uninspired. But when the genre […]
Day: September 24, 2015
- Features
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The 15 Greatest Cross-Gender Performances in Movie History
Throughout the history of acting, cross-gender performances used to be a common thing. From ancient Greek chorus to Japanese theater kabuki, the performers used to cross-dress and portray a character of the opposite sex. Nowadays, many things may have changed but cross-gender portrayals are not extinct from theatrical nor filmic representations and are very likely […]
Ville-Marie – VIFF 2015 Review
Quebecois director Guy Édoin trades in the bucolic setting of his first feature, 2011’s Wetlands, for the metropolitan Montreal borough of Ville-Marie for his ambitious, but ultimately overwrought ensemble drama follow-up. A passion piece akin to Paul Haggis’ sentimental oversell Crash, Ville-Marie similarly frames much of its plot around car crashes and how those tragedies […]
Le coeur de madame Sabali – VIFF 2015 Review
Early on in Ryan McKenna’s (The First Winter) thoughtful, candy-colored tragicomedy, Sabali, Jeannette (Marie Brassard), our put upon protagonist, tells a customer at the hotel where she works that she has a bad heart. This omission is both physically and metaphorically accurate as McKenna takes delight in exploring this eccentric woman in her journey to […]
Los Parecidos (The Similars) – VIFF 2015 Review
Mexico’s Isaac Ezban is two for two with his exhilarant follow-up to last year’s festival front-runner The Incident, the correspondingly science fiction-y mind-manipulator The Similars. Right out of the gate writer/director Ezban declares a wistful throwback via voiceover to the glory days of televised psychological suspense fare like The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone. […]
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15 Great Films Without a Soundtrack
How important is music to film? The American Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences would say important enough to merit an Oscar each year since 1935, not only for an original score, but an original song as well. Most prestigious film festivals give awards to composers and musicians thereby acknowledging their work as a […]