Meet Kazuto (Kazuto Osawa), an aspiring actor. There’s just one problem: confrontation makes him weak. So weak, in fact, he tends to faint and recovers only to severe embarrassment. This sets him apart from his childhood hero and career inspiration, Rescueman, a ridiculous caricature of superhero fame who appears throughout this cartoonish comedy. After Kazuto […]
Reviews
Siberia – VIFF 2020 Review
Proving once again beyond any shadow of a doubt that he’s one of modern cinema’s most unpredictable, prolific and provocative of filmmakers, and perhaps one who’s also touched with an otherworldly grace, Abel Ferrara (Ms .45, Bad Lieutenant, Tommas) busies himself exorcising some strange cinematic demons while unleashing his own inner force in his new […]
Father – VIFF 2020 Review
Father is director Srdan Golubović’s Serbian drama which memorably opens with a scene that’s very unsettling to witness. A mother with her two children in tow, arrives at the former workplace of her husband Nikola (Goran Bogdan). Unable even to afford food to feed them, she comes demanding to be paid the long overdue money […]
Black Bear – VIFF 2020 Review
The deceptively simple premise of a tense weekend in the woods with a small group of headstrong but emphatic characters gets mined for all its worth in this chamber piece from Lawrence Michael Levine (Wild Canaries), and the results are paradoxically satisfying and inconclusive in Black Bear, a film that, when it’s working, plays out […]
Violation – VIFF 2020 Review
Revenge movies have enormous popularity. We’ve all seen the victim get retribution against the evil stranger who lurks in the dark. But what is it like outside of the fantasy, when revenge is raw, and real, and against someone you might love? Violation aims to answer that question by placing us in the middle of […]
Last and First Men – VIFF 2020 Review
Perhaps best known, in North America at least, for his incredibly moving minimalist score for Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016), amongst others, Icelandic composer and filmmaker Jóhan Jóhannsson’s Last and First Men, released posthumously, makes for one haunting, honey of a post-apocalyptic parting gift. Jóhannsson, who tragically passed away in 2018 from an accidental overdose at […]