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‘Ready or Not 2: Here I Come’ Does It All Again, but More | Awesome Friday!
Ready or Not is a near-perfect concept for a high-concept horror film. A young woman marries into a rich family. It turns out they are Satan worshippers, and as part of the family initiation, she ends up playing a deadly game of hide-and-seek. Namely, she hides while they all try to kill her as a sacrifice to their benefactor. Violence and hilarity ensue. Ready or Not 2: Here I Come picks up immediately where Ready or Not ends, with Grace (Samara Weaving) on the steps of her now-dead in-laws’ burning mansion. She’s rushed to the hospital, where she wakes up…
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Daredevil: Born Again Season Two Review: The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen is Back for More | That Shelf
The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen is back for more.In the first season finale, Daredevil: Born Again left its pieces scattered across the board. Wilson Fisk, The Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio), was firmly entrenched as the mayor and had declared martial law. Jack Duquesne (Tony Dalton) is caged in an underground prison. Heather Glenn (Margarita Levieva) is dealing with the fallout of her experience with the villainous Muse. Officer Powell (Hamish Allan-Headley) patrols the streets with the Anti-Vigilante Task Force, rounding up anyone whom the mayor deems a threat. Benjamin Poindexter, the villain known as Bullseye (Wilson Bethel), has escaped and is…
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‘Youngblood’ Is a Sincere, if Familiar, Hockey Drama | Northern Reel
Sports are one of the prime frameworks upon which to build a cinematic story. Sports, at their core, are pure expressions of the human struggle to improve oneself and overcome struggles born from both within and without. They’re simple to understand but complicated to master, but just as often, the true answer is for a protagonist to master themselves before they can master the sport. The national winter sport of Canada is hockey, and as such it makes sense that if an 80s brat pack sports drama about hockey is going to be remade, that it would be remade…
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The Good, The Bad, The Weird | The LAMBCast
Always looking for odd take on cinema, the LAMB Community chose as it’s Western Genre movie for March, a non-western western. What may be called a kimchi western, since it comes from Korean Director Kim Jee-woon and features a setting in Manchuria in the 1930s as opposed to the American west after the civil war. Don’t worry, there is still a wartime background, just as there was in the Sergio Leone film that inspired this, but it is certainly different. Howard Casner championed the film, after mentioning it on a past show and having some other Lambs endorse the film.…
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‘Montreal, My Beautiful’ Is a Beautiful Film About Learning to Live Life Unencumbered | Northern Reel
It starts with a language class. Journeys of self-discovery often start with small steps. In the case of Feng Xia (Joan Chen), it begins when her daughter Joy (Pei Yao Xu), about to graduate high school and leave the nest, points out that she won’t be around to translate forever. Feng Xia has been a mother to Joy and her brother, Dong Dong (Anzhe Zhang), and a housewife to her husband, Jun (John Xu), since they emigrated to Montreal some 14 years ago. In all that time, dutifully tending to her family and helping in the convenience store Jun owns,…
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‘Hair of the Bear’ Plays Cat and Mouse in a Manitoba Winter | Northern Reel
Canada is a land of extremes. Our whole nation offers rugged outdoor adventure, but there are many places where merely existing can be a struggle against nature. Eastern Manitoba, in the dead of winter, is one of those places. A stark, beautiful, frozen landscape where knowing how to work with the elements is mandatory just to sustain yourself. This is the setting for Hair of the Bear, a new survival thriller from co-writers and directors James McLellan and Alexandre Trudeau1. The story opens with Tori (Malia Baker), who is in a troubled phase of her life and refuses to attend school, being delivered to the…
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‘Sweetness’ Sings a Song of Obsession | Northern Reel
Each of us only gets to be a teenager once. Our bodies coursing with hormones and our minds rapidly filling with new information, this is a time that can be chaotic emotionally as we navigate the world while developing into the people we’re going to be. This chaos, which is formative, is obviously difficult to navigate and leads some kids to places like depression, anxiety, anger, obsession, or some combination thereof. Sweetness is the story of one such teenager. Rylee (Kate Hallett) lives with her father, Ron (Justin Chatwin), and his girlfriend, Marnie (Amanda Brugel). Her mother passed away…
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‘In Cold Light’ Is an Excellently Performed, Average Film | Northern Reel
In Cold Light’s best scene is a confrontation between Maika Monroe’s Ava and her father, Troy Kotsur’s Will. She, fresh out of prison and on the run from a crooked cop chasing her for a crime she didn’t commit, and he, bitter and resentful at his family being torn asunder, have the conversation that they should have had years before. The scene plays out nearly wordlessly as they speak in sign language, and as a result, the performances are almost entirely body language, facial expression, and tone. Standing opposite each other in Will’s backyard under motion-activated floodlights, one has to…
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‘La Grazia’ Highlights Two Masters | Awesome Friday!
How do we measure our legacy? This is the question at the heart of Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia, the story of an Italian President facing down his last six months in office, and pondering what his legacy might be. Mariano De Santis (Toni Servillo) is a man of great repute. A steady, even-tempered president and renowned judge known for his understanding of -and adherence to- the letter of the law and the constitution. His last six months in office (what Italian politics refers to as the president’s white semester, during which he cannot dissolve parliament or call an election)…
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‘This Too Shall Pass’ Takes a Nostalgic, Heartfelt Journey to Ottawa | Northern Reel
A staple of filmmaking, the coming-of-age story works because, regardless of circumstances, we can all relate to the story being told. Whether we’re young and needing affirmation, or old and needing reminding, a story of a young person going on a quest and finding themselves in the process is one we can all see ourselves in. The execution is tricky; it’s easy to fall too far into familiar cliches without bringing anything new, but when one of these stories lands, it can be among the most satisfying. This Too Shall Pass narrowly avoids this trap by engaging with it directly.…
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‘Whistle’ is a Call to Horror Fans but Perhaps No One Else | Movies We Texted About
There are many subgenres of horror, but one of the most reliable is the “kids eff around and find out”. It’s a reliable setup that doesn’t require much work from filmmakers or the audience to make for a good time at the movies, even if the film we’re talking about isn’t that good to begin with. Whistle is the latest release in this subgroup.
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In the Heat of the Night | The LAMBCast
The MOTM for February was chosen from the Pool of Academy Award Winning films. Best Picture was the Genre for this month and Dave Anderson of the “Free Kittens Movie Guide” suggested this detective thriller as the choice for our discussion. Of course the movie is more than just a procedural, as it tackles racism and cultural divides in the transitional year of 1967. Howard Casner of “Pop Art” and Matthew Simpson from the “Awesome Friday Podcast” join us for a deep dive into this film that was a central part of the Hollywood revolution in the mid 1960s. We…
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‘Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie’ is One of the Funniest and Most Heartfelt Films of the Year | Northern Reel
Comedy is hard, and not all comedy is for everyone. Everyone has their own sensibilities, and these don’t always jibe with the sensibilities of those writing and delivering the jokes. A film like this one, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, attempts to thread the needle between being incredibly specific and incredibly broad, targeting both the wider general audience and millennial Canadians with a laser-like focus. Luckily, director Matt Johnson and his writing partner Jay McCarrol absolutely nail it here with Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, and deliver one of the best and funniest films of the…
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‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’ Runs Loops Around the AI Apocalypse | Exclaim!
The time loop movie has become a fixture of the science fiction genre, to the point where it feels like most avenues that can be explored through this device already been. Director Gore Verbinski and screenwriter Matthew Robinson challenge this premise with their latest film, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.
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“Cold Storage” Makes for a Decent Winter Off-Season Watch | ForReel
Cold Storage is very much in this third category. An science fiction action comedy in which a deadly alien fungus rages out of control in a self storage facility where an unsuspecting Georgina Campbell and Joe Keery work. The storage facility was previously a government base, and Liam Neeson shows up as the government agent tasked with containing the situation because he’s the one who put the fungus there in cold storage in the first place.
I am a Rotten Tomatoes-approved, freelance film & television critic and podcast host from Vancouver, Canada! I am a co-founder of the Cascadia Film & Television Critics Association and a voting member of the International Film Society Critics, Pandora International Critics, and the Online Film & Television Association.
I maintain bylines at Exclaim!, Awesome Friday!, That Shelf, ForReel, Movies We Texted About, KeithLovesMovies, and I can be heard regularly on the Contra Zoom Podcast and The LAMBCast.
