Vancouver International Film Festival

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…

A few years ago, a young British woman was murdered in Sienna, Italy. The case gained worldwide attention as the girls’ American roommate and friend were accused, tried, and convicted of the crime and then later acquitted on appeal. The Face of an Angel is a fictionalization of this case. Sort of. Rather than going…

It’s when he doesn’t speak that is most effective, though, in the pauses between lines or the scenes where he barely speaks at all, Carell brings something else to the character, and we’re able to see from his first scene that there’s something not quite right there, something broken, angry, and malevolent. The reasons…

The film does have some issues for me, the main one being a few things were pretty predictable, but these are very much overshadowed by the performances, particularly that of Matthew MacCaull as Noel. He disappears into the character and is genuinely menacing, especially in scenes where he’s just sharing a beer with someone…

Pulp: a Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets is an easy film to recommend. If you’re a fan of the band, then you should definitely want to check out the story of the band’s final concert –played in their hometown of Sheffield– and if you’re not a fan of the band, then you should check…

As the story starts, two brothers, both doctors, run a practice together in Paris. They’re both so devoted to their work that they’ve both remained bachelors. Enter Judith, a beautiful young mother they meet due to her daughter needing a house call, and they both fall in love. Each of the brothers is given…

Strangely, it feels like there could have been a legitimately great film here. If it has just been the story of Havana Segrand going insane working on a remake of her mother’s film, or if it has just been the story of a young girl with a troubled past trying to reconnect with her…