In the eighties and nineties, a film’s release on home video before any form of a theatrical release was quite damning. Cheap movies, b-movies, bad movies, or sequel titles with no one involved in the original film are what came to mind when one heard the words, “straight to video release”. That stigma (for better […]
Day: October 5, 2015
- Features
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The 10 Best Jodie Foster Movie Performances
Very few child actors have been able to maintain their star power at the box office over the course of several decades as adults. Jodie Foster is one of those actresses who have managed to stay the course and deliver knock out performances throughout the years. She began her career at the young age of […]
Into The Forest – VIFF 2015 Review
Alternating between somber and chimerical makes for an erratic and often heavy-handed ordeal in Canadian filmmaker Patricia Rozema’s (I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing) latest film, the dystopian drama, Into The Forest. It was the formidable lead actress, Ellen Page (Juno), who first brought the Jean Hegland novel about societal collapse and a return to nature, […]
Deathgasm – VIFF 2015 Review
If you’re of the belief that Kiwi splatter comedies have been beaten to death, then consider writer/director Jason Lei Howden’s Deathgasm a resurrection. Speaking straight to the outcast and ill at ease in us all, Howden heaves this mettlesome, indelicate and scatological midnight movie masterpiece all over us, and it’s a satiating mess. Combining the […]
Crumbs – VIFF 2015 Review
Crumbs is a fascinating and at times even astonishing directorial debut from Ethiopian filmmaker Miguel Llansó. Part post-apocalyptic melodrama, part peculiar pop culture collateral as objet d’art obiter dictum, Crumbs is a bedtime story for children of the far future. Telling the surreal yet straight-faced journey of the diminutive Birdy (Daniel Tadesse), whose beloved, Candy […]
High-Rise – VIFF 2015 Review
English novelist J.G. Ballard broke away from writing science fiction novels with a string of confrontational and controversial novels in the 1970s, which included The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Crash (1973), and High-Rise (1975). These postmodernist tomes proved auspicious and acclaimed, and, as David Cronenberg would discover with his 1996 adaptation of Crash, despite what backseat […]