An exceptionally funny and subtly experimental work of snark, cynicism, and sarcasm, director and co-writer Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin somehow finds a way to make the pain and suffering of millions of people into something worth uneasily laughing at.
A subtly paced, intricately designed, and powerfully moving depiction of loss, confusion, bureaucracy run amok, and guilt, Samuel Maoz’s Israeli drama Foxtrot covers a lot of thematic ground with great delicacy and emotional resonance.
Even after watching it, I’m not sure the teen movie-slash-political satire Dear Dictator is a real film.
The fourth dramatized retelling of one of the most harrowing hostage crises in world history, 7 Days in Entebbe boasts a perfect director for the intense job at hand and a maddening amount of technical, performative, and narrative inconsistencies at every other turn.
The charming, gentle, and effortlessly funny teen romantic comedy Love, Simon is a tried and true genre film with a novel, inclusive, and often sadly unused hook.
We were honoured to sit down with Helen Mirren last fall while she promoted The Leisure Seeker at the Toronto International Film Festival to talk about her experiences with road trips, starring in the English language debut of Italian writer-director Paolo Virzì, and how films about senior citizens have become unnecessarily condescending.
Canadian filmmaker Mina Shum’s low-key, slice-of-life dramedy Meditation Park would be better suited to a release date closer to Mother’s Day than late winter. It’s hardly a game changing look at one woman’s emotional middle aged awakening, but it’s a well intentioned film that I could see mothers and daughter enjoying together and talking about afterward.
Canadian documentarian Ann Shin’s moving and humane look at post war traumas in My Enemy, My Brother doesn’t quite deliver on the promise of its title and premise, but instead offers something far more personal, pointed, and heart wrenching.
Krysten Ritter has been fortunate enough to land the coveted role of one of pop culture’s most endearing and timely heroes in recent memory. Returning for the second season of Marvel’s Jessica Jones in the titular role, Ritter is the latest performer to transform their career by portraying a “superhero” of sorts that everyday people can actually relate to instead of an unstoppable, goody-two-shoes crime fighter. And to talk to Ritter, one gets the distinct sense that she wouldn’t have it any other way.
One could be forgiven for thinking that playwright turned filmmaker Cory Finley’s Thoroughbreds is a dark comedy made by a master of the genre. An accomplished, delicate, thoughtful, and purposefully unnerving working through of Finley’s own feelings about wealth, friendship, and the nature of empathy, Thoroughbreds is shockingly his debut work as a director and screenwriter. It’s a feat that’s almost unbelievable to anyone who views his final, confident results of his labours.
