Jordan’s 2015 Oscar Submission is a compelling, World War I story about a wily boy and his brother.
Film Reviews
Here you will find every film review we've written. These include: festival films, new releases, and older films.
Review: Songs My Brothers Taught Me
Chloë Zhao’s directorial debut “Songs My Brothers Taught Me” is a quiet, sensitive indigenous coming-of-age story set as high school graduation nears on the Pine Ridge Reserve.
Spectre Review: Mendes pulls from Shakespeare
How Sam Mendes borrowed from his King Lear production at the National Theatre when making his second James Bond film, Spectre.
This Changes Everything doesn’t preach on climate change
Avi Lewis’ documentary This Changes Everything looks at the narrative for civilization that allowed climate change to happen. Without preaching, the film takes a look at grassroots movements that are helping to mitigate climate change.
Nasty Baby is a half-baked bougie satire
The film gleefully sends up bourgeois attitudes as ridiculous before suggesting they’re harmful. Yet we’re not meant to dislike the characters causing harm. It’s an interesting premise that hasn’t been fully fleshed out. Likewise, Silva’s choice to shoot the film handheld, in all its clumsiness, prevents the film from ever being a beautiful work of art. It’s an aesthetic designed to be cheap and adaptable to an improvised script, but it doesn’t allow for much formal rigour. It lulls us into a kind of complacency, setting up a story of middle-class liberalism, before subverting the genre’s expectations.
Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words at MVFF 38
“Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words” is a loving tribute to the late, great Swedish actress told almost entirely from her perspective. Bergman brought her 16mm camera with her everywhere, and the years of footage she accumulated form the majority of the film’s images. Similarly, director Stig Björkman uses Bergman’s recorded interviews and letters to friends, read by Alicia Vikander, to narrate the film. Starting with Bergman’s childhood, most of which was spent with her father as her mother died when Bergman was still young, and ending with her final film project, Björkman gives a straightforward account of Bergman’s life, in chronological order.