TIFF18 REVIEW: Blindsone [Blind Spot] [2018]

Remember to breathe. The boldness of Tuva Novotny to choose to make her directorial debut a one-shot film of harrowing emotion cannot be understated. Her Blindsone [Blind Spot] takes us through the wringer as tragedy befalls a small, (seemingly) happy family without warning. These characters are distraught, confused, and falling to pieces as ambulances race and patience is tested before discovering new insights that may only provide more questions. And Novotny fearlessly traverses each new dramatic impulse, moving the camera from one to the other so we can be a…

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TIFF18 REVIEW: Endzeit [Endzeit – Ever After] [2018]

Go out and bury what haunts you. What if humanity’s apocalypse wasn’t the world’s end? We’ve become so used to treating ourselves as rulers of this planet despite knowing so little about it and the surrounding universe while also doing our best to destroy everything we touch. So what are we truly besides another in a long line of species with no greater hold on Mother Nature than the last? Our demise doesn’t therefore have to be by our own hand and hubris. Perhaps those two things merely place our…

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TIFF18 REVIEW: Kingsway [2018]

I’ve been on speaker? Love and suicide. Those are the words director Bruce Sweeney says inspired him to write Kingsway and are very much at the forefront of his dramedy about the dysfunctional Horvat family. And both are treated with humor despite never in a way that belittles their respective import. It’s not about laughing at suicide or those distraught and lost enough to contemplate the act. We smile instead because of our ability to see ourselves in the subject’s heaviness and a tumultuous aftermath that can lead towards a…

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TIFF18 REVIEW: Un ange [Angel] [2018]

I’d rather consider myself a gazelle. Two lost souls struggling to reconcile their image meet in Senegal by chance. One’s a prostitute—although she rejects the label and the registration card that’s as much a means to procure wealthy clients as a permanent brand upon her skin. The other is a world famous cyclist just recovered from a devastating accident that brought unsavory questions to light thanks to the hospital finding cocaine in his blood while there. Desperate to escape the limelight of fame and the spotlight of infamy, he flies…

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TIFF18 REVIEW: Freaks [2018]

Go away ghost. It’s weird to think about a movie like Push today—an under-appreciated, much-maligned sci-fi that I’d argue is a lot better than the legacy it’s been given. The X-Men and Spider-Man trilogies had completed by the time it was released and Iron Man just hit theaters the year before to usher in what would become the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And yet here was a smaller-scale, original piece centering upon a group of mutants that could exist outside the realm of built-in fandoms. Perhaps that which made it special…

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VENICE18 REVIEW: Why Are We Creative? [2018]

That’s the only question. The question that Hermann Vaske has asked for over two decades is a large one. Why Are We Creative? There’s no blanket answer—no right or wrong notion of the philosophical ramifications trying to put your own personal interpretation into words conjures. So it’s interesting that he would end his film with a statement explaining how the thousand-plus subjects he asked changed the way he looks at the world. It’s interesting because we don’t know if that is true. After traveling the world to confront geniuses in…

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VENICE18 REVIEW: Tumbbad [2018]

Wake her up and ask yourself. As the Hindu folktale at the start of Rahi Anil Barve and Adesh Prasad‘s Tumbbad states: while the Goddess of Plenty birthed 160 million deities from her womb (Earth), the one she loved most is also the one that’s been erased from memory. His name is Hastar and he was her first. As such, he saw the wealth and food she provided mankind and coveted it for himself. He reached for the gold and his brother and sisters allowed it for money was merely…

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TIFF18 REVIEW: Føniks [Phoenix] [2018]

It has to be my turn sometime. If our best laid plans are said to often go awry, what happens to the ones we hastily make in desperation? Writer/director Camilla Strøm Henriksen looks to supply an answer to that very question with her feature debut Føniks [Phoenix] because desperation is all young Jill (Ylva Bjørkaas Thedin) has left. Her fourteenth birthday is just days away and yet she returns home from school to see the beginnings of a celebration abandoned and her mother Astrid (Maria Bonnevie) asleep in bed. Knowing…

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BIFF18 REVIEW: Age Out [Friday’s Child] [2019]

I don’t hurt people. The only thing worse than never getting your happy ending is having it within grasp and realizing you cannot accept it. To see salvation and turn around knowing it would be a lie is the type of heartbreaking choice we often have to make in order to keep on going. It’s the decision that separates man from monster: an admission of remorse, guilt, and regret. Our actions cause ripples that affect countless others we haven’t met yet or never will and while that truth allows some…

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FANTASIA18 REVIEW: ペンギン・ハイウェイ [Pengin Haiwei] [Penguin Highway] [2018]

I might be too amazing for my own good. Adapted from Tomihiko Morimi‘s Nihon Science Fiction Taisho Award-winning novel from 2010, Penguin Highway takes us into a world barely unlike our own. Directed by Hiroyasu Ishida from Makoto Ueda‘s script, the film centers upon a Japanese fourth grader on the cusp of self-proclaimed greatness. With just under four thousand days until adulthood and his first Nobel Prize (he calculated it himself), nothing can peel Aoyama’s (Kana Kita) precocious interest from new, mysterious experimentations besides his crush: the town’s pretty dental…

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FANTASIA18 REVIEW: Cam [2018]

I literally love you. There’s a moment in director Daniel Goldhaber‘s Cam where Alice (Madeline Brewer) is talking to her younger brother Jordan (Devin Druid) about the previous evening’s performance on web-cam site Free Live Girls. She moved past sex gimmicks towards the dark world of snuff film aesthetics and it worked to move her up more leaderboard spots in one session than she ever had before. He gives her a congratulatory fist-bump and asks whether she’s told their mother (Melora Walters‘ Lynne) what her new lucrative job actually is…

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