Nothing is more terrifying than a teenage girl, except perhaps the mysterious witch of the woods. There’s also no better scapegoat. Such is the premise of writer-director Robert Eggers’ masterfully directed but disappointingly dull psychological horror film, “The VVitch” set in seventeenth century New England. When the patriarch William (Ralph Ineson with lengthy, curly, Jesus-like […]
Essays
TIFF15 review: NFB history doc Ninth Floor sheds light on our racial biases
Mina Shum’s taut and accomplished documentary The Ninth Floor is an extremely important film about racial discrimination in Canada. Not only does it retell a crucial part of Canadian history that never made it into the history books I studied in school, but the incident it depicts has continued relevance today. The title refers to the […]
Fire Song presents an authentic, First Nations queer narrative
Adam Garnet Jones’ Fire Song is a frank portrait of indigenous LGBT people and how depression and isolation intersect within a First Nation community.
TIFF 15 review: Muntean’s One Floor Below feels like a pointless exercise
Romanian auteur Radu Muntean’s entirely skippable One Floor Below follows a car insurance salesman whose nosiness gets the better of him. After eavesdropping too deliberately on the couple downstairs’ fight one night, he discovers that the woman is dead.
TIFF15: How Heavy This Hammer explores masculinity in crisis ****
Mary Angela Rowe reviews one of the best films of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival from Canadian director Kazik Radwanski. To discover more great Canadian Cinema, take the Canadian Cinema Challenge and get a copy of our ebook on Canadian film, The 2019 Canadian Cinema Yearbook here.
NFB short Rock The Box **1/2: unclear intentions in promising feminist short
Rhiannon Rozier has a degree in political science and Latin American history, but her true passion is connecting to people through music. She is a DJ and creates electronic dance music (EDM), but she’s also a woman, working in a male-dominated genre. Katherine Monk’s National Film Board of Canada documentary short Rock the Box begins with […]