I am a freelance film 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.
The March Movie of the Month is an exploitation thriller that doubles as a disaster film. If there are consistent threads in the 70s wave of disaster pictures it was that Irwin Allen Produced them or Charlton Heston starred in them. The outsized producer is absent this week but we…
Where even to begin with The Electric State? The latest film from the Russo Brothers features an all star cast and is set in a 1990s-influenced retro future full of pop culture references, but fails at almost every turn to be anything interesting at all. Let’s not mince words here,…
Jay and Mark are joined by Matthew Simpson from Awesome Friday (@SMatthewAF and @awesomefridayca on X) to discuss “Untimely Jam” the 11th chapter of DBS. In this episode, they also talk about big waves, helicopters in creature features, and Renny films that should be in the Criterion collection. Enjoy! This week,…
Before the days of Disney+, Marvel Studios struck a deal with Netflix to bring several of their street-level heroes to the small screen. There were several, but the first of them was Daredevil, a master acrobat and vigilante who wears a red combat suit adorned with devil’s horns and who is,…
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Two coworkers, one a little uptight and by the book and the other perhaps a little too loose for their own good, have their fates and jobs intertwined by happenstance. Then, hilarity—with a dash of honesty and vulnerability—ensues. This is the tried-and-true setup…
This is my second year as a voting member of OFTA, and this years awards are now announced! The Online Film & Television Association has selected Anora as 2024’s best film. In addition, it was presented two other prizes. Sean Baker’s film about a exotic dancer who marries a Russian playboy who…
We’ve seen many films with protagonists haunted by their trauma and soldiers struggling to return home before; what sets My Dead Friend Zoeapart is its performances, specifically Sonequa Martin-Green’s. She proves herself beyond a shadow of a doubt, playing Merit constantly under stress, not only from what’s going on in her…
…This first layer of the story is fascinating, with Stan playing Edwrard playing Guy playing Edward, and crushing it. He threads a precise needle with this performance in which he is very visibly still the same man he was but can project confidence while never letting anyone know whom he…
It’s hard to believe that Disney+ is now five years old, and it has yet to feature a series from Pixar. Films are both short and feature-length, yes, but while effectively every other branch of the Disney empire has branched out into streaming series, Pixar has taken the longest to arrive. It’s…
Everything that happens has happened for a first time. Terrorism as we know it has been with us since the late 18th century, but on September 5th, 1972, something happened for the first time. As the Palestinian militant group Black September stormed the Munich Olympic Village, killed two members of…
Paolo Sorrentino has made a name for himself by telling wistful, dreamlike stories about beautiful people existing in beautiful places. His latest film, Parthenope, is not an exception to this trend. Following the life of a young woman from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, as she lives and loves…
In the earliest scenes of The Gorge, we meet our two protagonists, Levi (Miles Teller) and Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy). Levi, a former Marine scout sniper, lives a life of solitude, wayward and clearly suffering from some form of PTSD. He receives a text telling him to report to a Marine base…
Disco was a dirty word, at least when I was a teenager in the 1990s. It was an exiled musical style from a bygone era, only spoken about to ridicule. Even when the 20-year fashion cycle caught up to us and made bell-bottom — apologies, flared — cool again, we didn’t dare…
Who would have thought that we’d get back to back MOTM Episodes? That happened because we had no show the first week of February and with a short month, things sneak up on you. This month all of the choices for MOTM were provided by the host,, it is his…
Spider-Man endures as one of the most iconic and relatable superheroes. He starts his journey when he’s just a kid, learning hard lessons early about the nature of responsibility — everyone knows the quote — and he spends his time trying to balance his normal life with his superhero life,…
Famous for it’s disturbing scene set in a subway station, “Possession” is the 1981 film from Polish Director Andrzej Żuławski. Is it a horror film, a psychological drama, or an autobiographical cry for help from a man going through a painful breakup? Whatever answer you come up with, you will…
Star Trek is one of the greatest pop culture franchises on the planet. It has been running for nearly 60 years, spanning more than 700 television episodes across ten series and thirteen—now fourteen—movies. It is a ubiquitous cultural touchstone that many people hold dear, this critic included. The beauty of the franchise…
[L]et’s look back at the best films that came out from 2020-2024. We sent out a poll to critics and made a list of the 50 best films of the decade so far. Last week on Part 1, we revealed picks 50-26. Now here is Part 2 where we count down…
Love can happen at any time or place and to anyone. Sometimes there’s a long, slow period of courtship and sometimes there’s an immediate attraction, a lightning bolt that strikes a person to let them know that they’ve just met their one person. But does the lighting always strike both…
What If…?, the long-running Marvel comic book series, is one of the most fun titles in the company’s entire repertoire. Each issue places one of their characters in some new context, either by examining a different pivotal choice they could have made or by shifting them into another universe entirely.…