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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.
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Islands: Sam Riley Shines in this Sun-Drenched Mystery | That Shelf
“I’m not running away. I like it here.” This is Tom, a tennis pro living on a sweltering resort island, caught walking a knife-edge between denial and self-reflection. It’s never made clear exactly what Tom (Sam Riley) is running from in director Jan-Ole Gerster’s newest film, Islands, but that is by design. We don’t need to know what he is specifically avoiding because he is quite clearly running from everything.
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The Hilarious, Heartfelt ‘Wonder Man’ Is Something Entirely New for Marvel |Exclaim!
Wonder Man is unlike anything that we have seen in the MCU to date. A meta story about heroes, Hollywood, self-expression and finding your truth, that is, in a word, excellent.
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Movie Review: ‘People We Meet on Vacation’ Is Fine for an Uneventful Evening at Home | ForReel
People We Meet on Vacation is the latest entry in the genre. It is, in a word, familiar.
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Santa Jaws | The LAMBCast
Matthew joins The LAMBCast Holiday Special to talk about Santa Jaws, very bad (but maybe good?) movie.
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Exclaim!’s 13 Best TV Series of 2025 | Exclaim!
This year’s ‘best of’ list season is off to a strong start. For Exclaim!, I contributed two blurbs for their Best Television Series of 2025 list. Severance: After the first season of Severance captured the zeitgeist back in 2022, viewers clamoured for answers to the series’ mysteries. Season 2 delivers on that promise and then some. Answering questions (but asking even more) while diving deeper into both halves of each of our main characters, the series posits hard questions about grief, identity and personal agency in a hyper-capitalist society. Beautifully acted and gorgeously shot, the allegories for our times in Severance are prescient, poignant and…
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Exclaim!’s 20 Best Films of 2025 | Exclaim!
For this year’s top twenty list from Exclaim!, I was invited to write up a blurb for one of my personal favourites: The Naked Gun. Given that the sensibilities of The Naked Gun — namely, be as silly as possible and do anything for the laugh — seem like a product of a bygone era, it’s perhaps an unlikely franchise for a legacy sequel. But it turns out that some styles of comedy are timeless. Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson are both at their very best, deadpanning ridiculous lines from a script that is all at once smart, clever, unsubtle, juvenile and the…
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Cool Runnings | The LAMBCast
We almost skipped the MOTM because the Shepard was away from the pasture. Fortunately, there were itinerant Podcast Hosts, seeking one off jobs and they happen to be other LAMBs. Matthew Simpson of the Cascadia Film and TV Critics Association, and the Awesome Friday Podcast, as well as a regular MOTM guest, volunteered to take over, which lead to a last minute poll of Sports films, as that was the Genre of the month. “Draft Day” took the Bronze and “Bend It Like Beckham” was the Silver Medalist. The Gold however went to 1993’s “cool Runnings” a Disney film telling…
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Nuremberg Review: Well-Acted Drama Misses Opportunity to Be More | That Shelf
“We are able to do away with domestic tyranny only when we make all men answerable to the law, so that it can never happen again.” A noble quote from a noble man, Justice Robert H Jackson, as played by Michael Shannon in James Vanderbilt’s new World War II legal drama, Nuremberg. The trials, held in the aftermath of the war, put the leaders of the Third Reich on trial for all to see. While it’s a historical moment now, it was a dangerous gamble then. On the one hand, it gave the world an opportunity to see these Nazis…
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Old, Young and New Frankenstein | Contra Zoom
With the latest version of the classic Mary Shelly story Frankenstein coming out from director Guillermo del Toro, we look back at the history of this monster movie. Pairing the latest version with 1931’s Frankenstein directed by James Whale and 1974’s Young Frankenstein directed by Mel Brooks. Dakota, Jeff and Matthew discuss adapting the book to screen and how the versions work telling the same story in different manners. Listening Links
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2025 Vancouver International Film Festival | Contra Zoom
The 44th edition of the Vancouver International Film Festival just concluded and we are here to talk about some of our favourite films that played! Joining Dakota and Matthew is Darren Zakus from Movie Scene Canada. The guys talk about Deathstalker and A Welcome Distraction (Dakota’s picks), Wrong Husband and Blue Heron (Matthew’s picks) and Blue Moon and Is This Thing On? (Darren’s picks). Listening Links
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VIFF 2025: The Arctic and Its People Shine in ‘Uiksaringitara (Wrong Husband)’ | Exclaim!
Set in the remote village of Igloolik circa 2000 BCE, Uiksaringitara (Wrong Husband), the latest from acclaimed director Zacharias Kunuk, tells the story of Kaujak (Theresia Kappianaq) and Sapa (Haiden Angutimarik), two young people betrothed since childhood and about to come of age. After the death of Kaujak’s father, a man (Mark Taqqaugaq) arrives from another village and negotiates his way into marrying her now-widowed mother, Nujatut (Leah Panimera). With Sapa away, Kaujak is forced to accompany Nujatut to her new family and camp where three young men vie for Kaujak’s hand in marriage. Upon Sapa’s return, he sets out on the journey to…
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.
