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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…
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VIFF 2025: ‘Peak Everything’ Finds Amour Amidst Our Modern Apocalypse | Exclaim!
The world is changing for Adam (Patric Hivon), and for us. Increasing temperatures, rising sea levels, weather events becoming more extreme — and there’s very little we can do at this point. We’ve gone past the point where anyone can reasonably deny that human activity has directly effected climate, and that’s cause for great concern. In Adam’s case, anxiety ties him in knots so tightly that he can neither stand still nor bridge the gulf that exists between himself and the other people in his life. To put it lightly, Adam’s a mess. A fortysomething owner of a dog kennel,…
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VIFF 2025: ‘Blue Heron’ Takes Flight with Tender Devastation | Exclaim!
Blue Heron will reach into the soul of anyone who has lost someone. It will pull out emotions long thought forgotten or moved past, and examine them through the small moments of half-remembered connection. Set in both the past and present, Blue Heron tells the story of a girl turned young woman named Sasha as she attempts to reckon with the tragedy of her brother’s life and death. Writer and director Sophy Romvari’s semi-autobiographical film is a deeply personal affair. The girl and the young woman represent stand-ins for Romvari, a conceit made overtly clear later in the film when the protagonist becomes a filmmaker…
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The IFSCA 100 Best Films of the 21st Century (So Far), #10 to #1
This is the fifth and final part of the IFSCA’s Best Films of the Century (So Far) list, which I administered and compiled for our membership. It was a lot of work to put together, requiring a ton of Excel tomfoolery, and then tracking down users to provide write-ups for the films. In addition to that, in the top ten, I also contributed a write-up for Mad Max: Fury Road (#8). And so our list draws to a close. This was a fun exercise for us at the IFSCA, and here are a few interesting tidbits about the list and…
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The IFSCA 100 Best Films of the 21st Century (So Far), #30 to #11
This is the fourth part of the IFSCA Best Films of the Century (So Far) list, which I administered. Welcome back to the fourth installment in the IFSCA’s Best of the 21st Century so far! We have so far counted down from 100 to 76, 75 to 51, and 50 to 31. Many of the films we’ve highlighted so far have been classics, and here come twenty more. These are numbers 30 through 11. Link: https://ifscritics.wordpress.com/2025/10/04/100-best-films-of-the-21st-century-30-to-11/
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The IFSCA 100 Best Films of the 21st Century (So Far), #50 to #31
The third part of the IFSCA Best Films of the Century (So Far) list, which I administered. We’re crossing the halfway point in our Best of the Century list! We’ve already counted down from 100 to 76 and 75 to 51, and among them are many modern classics. Now, as we dive into the top half of the ranking, we’re going to visit the wilds of Toronto, worlds of superheroes, quiet days in busy cities, and everything in between. Here are our numbers 50 through 31 of the IFSCA’s Best films of the 21st Century so far. Link: https://ifscritics.wordpress.com/2025/10/03/100-best-films-of-the-21st-century-50-to-31/
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The IFSCA 100 Best Films of the 21st Century (So Far), #75 to #51
The second part of the IFSCA Best of the Century (So Far) list. In addition to organizing and administering this list, in this section I also contributed a write-up for Brokeback Mountain (#73). Welcome back to the IFSCA’s 100 Best Films of the 21st Century! In our last post, we counted down from number 100 to number 76, and today we carry on with numbers 75 to 51. We’ve had some great films mentioned so far, and there are so many more to come! So without further ado, here are our 75th to 51st favourite films of the century so far!…
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The IFSCA 100 Best Films of the 21st Century (So Far), #100 to #76
Inspired by the New York Times poll of the same name, I organized and administered a poll of the membership of the International Film Society Critics to determine the films that we consider to be the 100 best of the 21st Century so far. In addition to adminstering this list, in this section I also contributed write ups for Another Round (#99) and Columbus (#96). A lot can happen in 25 years: Birth, love, school, children, and more, but if you’re lucky, you get some really great movies in between. From romantic comedies to gothic thrillers to heartfelt dramas to…
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‘The Lost Bus’ Can’t Find Its Way Through the Flames | Exclaim!
On paper, this movie should work. Acts of heroism in dire circumstances make for good watching, but Greengrass fails to deliver on the film’s promise of tension and thrills. Meanwhile, there’s a whole crew of first responders actually fighting the fire who we almost never get to see in the movie. The story of how PG&E didn’t maintain their power lines very well, and how they weren’t able to shut the power off immediately when the firefighters asked, never gets told, and no PG&E employees of any meaningful variety appear at all. In 2019 the California Department of Forestry and…
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Eleanor the Great Review: An Excellent Showcase for June Squibb | That Shelf
Grief is among the most challenging of human emotions. It’s a coupling of despair at loss, the ennui of loneliness, and the fondness of memory. It is a persistence of love, but also an absence that can leave us scrambling to fill the void it has created. Eleanor the Great is a film marketed as a light-hearted dramedy about a nonagenarian forming an unlikely friendship with a twenty-something, and it is that, but it’s also a film about that void; how we approach and deal with it, and the lengths that some of us will go to fill it. Link: https://thatshelf.com/eleanor-the-great-review-an-excellent-showcase-for-june-squibb/
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‘Black Rabbit’ Series Review: Jude Law and Jason Bateman As Brothers | Movies We Texted About
We don’t choose our family. Love them, hate them, they are our families, and we are stuck with them. Some of us are blessed with living, supportive ones; others not so much, and the rest fall somewhere in between. Black Rabbit is a story of brothers who fall somewhere in between. Jake (Jude Law) and Vince (Jason Bateman) Friedken grew up in New York, the sons of a loving mother and a violent father. In the wake of their father’s death, they spent their formative years hustling, with dreams of making it as a band and later, a high-end restaurant: the titular Black Rabbit. At the…
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Nika & Madison Review: TIFF 2025
In Canada, we have an ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women. According to research done by Statistics Canada, women of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit descent are six times more likely to be murdered than their non-Indigenous counterparts. They also face assault, both physical and sexual, at disproportionately higher rates, and the perpetrators are caught less frequently. If none of this information was bad enough, there’s also the fact that this violence is rooted in systemic oppression by a settler colonial state, and that the RCMP are complicit in, and in some cases perpetrate, these acts. These statistics remain shocking, no…
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“Modern Whore” Is an Entertaining and Necessary Doc on Sex Work | ForReel
Sex work is work. Let’s get that out of the way right off the bat. Society has traditionally looked down on sex work, and in particular sex workers, for various reasons rooted in dubious morality (and religion), but the fact remains that sex work is work, and sex workers are deserving of respect and dignity. They are, after all, human beings. This is the worldview – which is the correct one, at least according to this critic – that Andrea Werhun advocates for in Modern Whore. This new documentary from Werhun and director Nicole Bazuin seems to break open doors…
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Before The Naked Gun, ‘Police Squad!’ Was on the Case (Review) | Movies We Texted About
The filmmaking trio of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker (better known as Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker or ZAZ) made their mark on cinema early in their careers. They began with The Kentucky Fried Movie, an anthology film of sketch comedy that did quite well critically and commercially, and then with their sophomore effort, they all but created a genre of film. Airplane!, released in 1980, took the idea of a parody film and cranked it up to eleven. The film is a lean 87-minute parody of the disaster film Zero Hour! that the filmmakers stuffed to bursting with some of the funniest slapstick, absurdist, sight gags, and wordplay that had been…
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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.
