Heartfelt and honest, albeit scattered in places and increasingly strained down the stretch, writer-director Zach Braff’s A Good Person is an effectively familiar look at the dark point where addiction and grief intersect.
Florence Pugh
Jimmy Kimmel hosted the Academy Awards in Los Angeles, and the red carpet was lit up with James Hong, Sarah Polley, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh, Michael B. Jordan, and many more.
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is a lot more fun, stylish, and ambitious than one would expect from a sequel to a franchise spin-off that’s arriving around a decade after its predecessor.
Scarlett Johansson is a sight for sore eyes. Marvel’s Black Widow is out in Canada on Disney+ Premier Access now, and the film finally brings Natasha Romanoff back to us for some big screen revenge, and it’s a helluva ride.
A sprawling, ambitious, indulgent, and assuredly unnerving follow-up to his terrifying critical and commercial success Hereditary, Ari Aster’s sun and blood drenched Midsommar is yet another example of a filmmaker throwing everything they can into their second feature because their first major success has allowed them a lot of leeway to go a bit crazy and over-the-top.
The light beer equivalent of Braveheart, David Mackenzie’s competent, but relatively pointless epic Outlaw King has plenty of bloodshed, lots of actors shouting impassionedly, expertly lensed melees, picturesque locations, and not much else of note.
British filmmaker William Oldroyd might have a background in theatre, but his debut feature, Lady Macbeth (opening in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal this weekend) has less in common with Shakespeare than its title might suggest. More attuned to contemporary cinema and classic literature, Oldroyd’s film breathes new life into stodgy tropes of Victorian Era period pieces and creates a monster of a sexually loaded power struggle.
One of the most quietly dazzling and nuanced debut features in recent memory, William Oldroyd’s subtly nasty Lady Macbeth heralds the arrival of several major new voices in film. It’s a tightly crafted and exceptionally well directed period piece spawned from an appropriately weighty script and anchored by a still emerging leading talent delivering one of the year’s best performance. Lady Macbeth isn’t a traditional feel good movie or revenge narrative by any stretch, but it’s some of the most devilish fun artistically inclined audiences can have while squirming uncomfortably in their seats.