Alfre Woodard’s morally and spiritually exhausted prison warden in Chinonye Chukwu’s tense drama Clemency lives in the brain long after the film ends. Warden Williams oversees executions in her facility and has managed to repress the horror; she’s developed an intense rigidity that colours her job and her marriage; unable to sleep or connect with her long-suffering husband, she’s an automaton, carrying… View Post
Ladj Ly’s timely take on Victor Hugo’s novel, Les Misérables moves from 1862 to present-day Paris, when racism, immigration bias, police corruption, enforced prostitution and poverty still thrive. The added elements of instability, drug addiction and trafficking help push the divide between the have-nots and the police. For instance, three gendarmes, the thuggish white lead man, a black officer straddling moral… View Post
Toronto born cousins Robbie and Stephen Ammel joined forces with director Jeff Chan to make a feature-length version of their hit 2016 short film Code 8. Set in the troubling world of Lincoln City (Toronto) they are relegated to the fringes of society because they have special superpowers and because they are feared. The superpower subclass suffers from poverty, joblessness… View Post
Peter Strickland, known for his daring and provocative films including The Duke of Burgundy is no less outside the box with his sensational In Fabric a sophisticated mind-bending, ironic take on horror. The threatening soundscape and often indirect cinematography create an otherworldly, creepy vibe, giving the sense of being spied upon, over the course of three stories. And Strickland’s villain is… View Post
Peter Strickland’s In Fabric isn’t for the faint-hearted or unimaginative moviegoer. It is demanding, challenging, off-putting and vexing, and it’s one of the most dazzling films of the year. It’s an hypnotic, fever dream following three people victimized by a red silk dress, purchased during the holiday department store sales in London. Strickland’s glorious multi-faceted high art comedy/drama/horror film stars… View Post
Fernando Meirelles The Two Popes is a rarity, an important true-life religious story, an intellectual and elegant psychological thriller with massive scale and palpable intimacy. It follows the world-altering events in the Roman Catholic Church in 2013 and the things that lie uncomfortably in two men’s hearts. Argentinian Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce) contacts Pope Benedict (Anthony Hopkins), a German, to… View Post