Vancouver International Film Festival 2020

For Foggo, John Ware has been a lifelong concern. She started a research file in the early days of her career as a writer and, in 2012, wrote a play titled John Ware Reimagined –songs from which are staged throughout this film– about his life and times. She admits that she knows she is…

On its face, Jumbo is about a young woman who falls in love with a carnival ride. No, not “oh hey, I love that ride.” She develops a deep emotional and sexual attachment to the ride. Yes, that’s a bit weird, but that is just the surface of the story. At its heart, Jumbo is about…

Of all the stories presented, one common thread is money. Unfortunately, those who do the damage are more concerned with money than with the people affected. Again, this is not new information. Living through late-stage capitalism has made none of this surprising, only disappointing. Many stories in The Magnitude of All Things are as much about…

What makes Inconvenient Indian powerful is that it doesn’t let us get away with this. After a long section of various indigenous efforts to reclaim culture and foster some hope, the film also draws a straight line from our collective past to our present ignorance. It directly shows the police violently arresting Wetʼsuwetʼen people in BC…

Backo is captivating here, and she works through Samira’s pain by gradually connecting with her fellow patients at the clinic. Her performance runs the gamut of human emotion and requires her to go to some very vulnerable places, and she does so with aplomb. The rest of the ensemble is good, with Canadian icons…

True to the film’s name, we never actually see the basketball game. It instead focuses on the rest of the late 1990s night in the school. It follows a theatre group grappling with their staging of King Lear being shut down, as well as the players on the team struggling to explain the existentialism…

[…] the film struggles because the performances and pacing are uneven in the first two acts. I can’t speak to why exactly, but it feels rushed. Then, in the third act, in which the main character, Lisa, finally accepts who she is and what she needs to do, the film really picks up, but…