Éva Husson’s Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story) finds a sweet romance in a tale of teenagers these days and their orgies. The film opens on a pubescents-gone-wild party in a small-town mansion in France. The camera pans around the room to reveal that couples are having sex in the open, people are sitting around naked, […]
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TIFF15: Jennifer Peedom discusses her Everest doc Sherpa
Jennifer Peedom discusses the making of her terrific Everest doc, Sherpa, the first documentary to be told from the Sherpa’s perspective.
Victoria is a trying tale of an endless night of excitement
In the last act of Victoria, the male protagonist Sonne (Frederick Lau) asks a quivering man, who has obeyed his orders made at gunpoint, “Just how stupid are you?” I burst out laughing. It’s a tense moment, but the entire film has been an exercise in finding out just how stupid Sonne, and his infatuated […]
TIFF15: Manal Issa is an exquisite discovery in Parisienne
When Parisienne begins, we meet the beautiful Lina (Manal Issa), an eighteen-year-old freshman from Beirut, studying abroad in Paris. She’s eating dinner at her uncle’s house in the suburbs, the only connection to home she has in this strange country, when he attempts to rape her. She stops him, violently, before running out into the night […]
Racing Extinction: awe-inspiring images overpowered by activism narrative
We’re in an age of mass extinction. For centuries, you might expect one species to go extinct per year, but thanks to human activities, these numbers have increased by orders of magnitude. Director Louie Psihoyos’ Racing Extinction aims to not just manufacture outrage about this fact, but to create a sense of wonder at the natural […]
The Martian engineers the shit out of surviving on Mars
The Martian would be a great engineering recruitment film — if it ever mentioned the word “engineering.” When Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is faced with the challenges of surviving alone on Mars for four years, including growing his own own food and figuring out a way to communicate with Earth, he concludes he’ll have to “science […]