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 […]
VIFF 2015
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 […]
Green Room – VIFF 2015 Review
The teeth-baring ferociousness on sharp-edged display in Jeremy Saulnier‘s intense new film, Green Room, rivals his previous film, 2014’s Blue Ruin, making it catnip for extreme action thriller devotees. Fascinating, forcible, and rough, Saulnier offers a punk rock variant on Rio Bravo – with a likeable rabble impossibly endangered in an under siege scenario – […]
Brand: A Second Coming – VIFF 2015 Review
It was eleven years ago that documentary filmmaker Ondi Timoner first came to my attention at VIFF with her audacious and dizzying film Dig! back in 2004. It was a momentous music doc focussing on the love-hate and dog-eat-dog relationship between rival bands, the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and the Dandy Warhols. Timoner’s celebratory and wistful […]
The Assassin – VIFF 2015 Review
Legendary Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien (Millennium Mambo) is first and foremost a contemplative stylist, the idea of applying his kind of formalism to the wuxia genre is fascinating, and as ever, Hou’s execution is faultless, but martial arts fans are bound to feel perpetually cold-shouldered. Hou is a critical darling, and his best works – […]