As part of an exclusive virtual event, I got a chance to watch the first 11 minutes of The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It. Introducing the footage was director Michael Chaves, who takes over from James Wan. Wan created and directed the first two films in the franchise and produced this one.
What a night! The 2021 Oscars are a wrap, and Nomadland was one of the big winners, walking away with three Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director for Chloé Zhao, and Best Actress for Frances McDormand.
The 93rd Academy Awards are live from Union Station in Los Angeles tonight, and the press room has gone virtual this year, so I’m tuned in from Toronto, getting ready for the winners to answer questions backstage.
Mostly one for the fans, but still offering an engaging (if almost punishingly long) profile of a pop star, Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry charts the meteoric rise and overwhelming success of its teenage subject.
The most talked about documentary of the year thus far, Framing Britney Spears gives an impassioned overview of efforts to free one of the biggest pop stars in the world from a court order that has restricted her career and personal life since 2008.
Lee Isaac Chung’s period drama Minari is one of the best films ever made about the Asian-American immigrant experience. It’s also one of the best films ever made about rural living and the seemingly never-ending chase for some to achieve “the American dream.”
Some Kind of Heaven, the first feature-length documentary from filmmaker Lance Oppenheim, is a moving and honest look about people growing older but never fully growing up.
A keenly detailed and emotionally charged snapshot of a young woman in free fall (both figuratively and literally), Canadian filmmaker Kazik Radwanski’s Anne at 13,000 ft. is a monumental achievement on an intimate scale.
An intelligent, but uneven sci-fi thriller that never settles on a proper tone, Synchronic mostly flounders, but still has some flashes of genuine ingenuity and entertainment value.
Supernova is an achingly beautiful, progressive, tender, morally complex, and empathetic love story that takes subject matter often reserved for television-movie-of-the-week fodder and turns it into something truly special and original.
