Now that the sun has set on the 38th annual Vancouver International Film Festival (which ran from September 26th to October 11th, 2019), Taste of Cinema offers up our favorites from what was another bustling, exciting, and very impressive festival. As with previous years at VIFF, it was a very crowded field with so many […]
Author: Shane Scott-Travis
Portrait Of A Lady On Fire – VIFF 2019 Review
French formalist writer-director Céline Sciamma (Girlhood [2014]) is completely in her element with her exquisitely tender costumer, the laudable and lovely new film Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Having already achingly smouldered earlier this year at Cannes where it rightfully netted the award for Best Screenplay, Sciamma’s painterly perfection focusses on Marianne (Noémie Merlant) […]
Bait – VIFF 2019 Review
Cornish writer-director Mark Jenkin has, with his debut feature film Bait, created a daringly original and unique film that feels like a found artifact from an antiquated era. Shot on 16mm black-and-white Kodak film stock with a 43-year-old wind-up Bolex camera, there’s an unmistakable Dogme vibe to Jenkin’s class clash picture (Jenkin’s authored a very […]
Amanda – VIFF 2019 Review
The opening scenes of the new Mikhaël Hers drama Amanda depict a sun-soaked Paris that thrums with vivid life. The characters we meet may be mundane and prosaic, but that makes them all the more relatable. There’s David (Vincent Lacoste), a flighty twenty-something and sometimes arborist, who gets along well with his older, wiser, more […]
Babysplitters – VIFF 2019 Review
Writer-director Sam Friedlander’s refreshingly upbeat comedy sets its sights on the ambiguity couples often have over whether or not to have kids. Presenting itself as something of a modernized screwball comedy––and I’ll define that for people unfamiliar with the sometimes misused term; it’s a rom-com subgenre from the Golden Age of Hollywood that juxtaposes opposites […]
Deerskin – VIFF 2019 Review
Georges has a real killer look in writer/director Quentin Dupieux’s latest film, a batshit-beyond-all-reason black comedy/character piece called Deerskin. Dupieux, the deranged genius behind such wonderfully weird films as the absurdist horror tale Rubber (2010), and the irreverent comic mystery Wrong (2012) is no stranger to bizarre backroads and crackpot detours into the ludicrously far-out […]