From South Korea’s provocateur and sensual stylist extraordinaire Park Chan-wook comes The Handmaiden, a stunning if somewhat strained fetish revenge tale set in 1930s Korea. Following 2013’s Hitchcockian horror-thriller Stoker, Park’s latest continues to plumb female sexuality and the female experience of sex with men absent, and The Handmaiden is all the more effective when […]
Author: Shane Scott-Travis
Weirdos – VIFF 2016 Review
Something of an illustrious symbol of Canadian cult cinema thanks to films like Highway 61 (1991), Hard Core Logo (1996) and Pontypool (2009), Bruce McDonald kinda sorta revisits his earlier catalogue with his latest film. 1989’s Roadkill was an idiosyncratic road movie with an indelible soundtrack and shot in black-and-white and the same can be […]
Pulling Focus: They Live (1988)
“They Live is one of the best films of a fine American director.” – Martin Scorsese California Über Alles In 1985 or thereabouts, around the time John Carpenter was taking a detour from his exploitation horror films to do the more family-friendly live-action cartoon Big Trouble in Little China, “The Master of Horror”––as he […]
I, Daniel Blake – VIFF 2016 Review
One-hundred percent deserving of the Golden Palm at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, Ken Loach’s understated treasure I, Daniel Blake is an absolutely edifying achievement. Loach, a connoisseur of kitchen sink realism who’s now 80 years-old, has hinted on several occasions that he’s retiring, and if these reports are accurate then that makes I, Daniel […]
The Unseen – VIFF 2016 Review
The directorial debut from Geoff Redknap, best known as an old hand effects makeup artist (he cut his teeth on moody sci-fi TV shows like The X-Files and Supernatural before doing features like Cabin in the Woods), is ripe with promise and possibility as he takes a crack at the old chestnut The Invisible Man. […]
Aquarius – VIFF 2016 Review
It’s astonishing that Aquarius is only Kleber Mendonça Filho’s second feature, for it attests a true genius. This honest, mosaic-like drama from Brazil appears, on the surface, to be a rhetoric-addled prescription for maudlin sentimentality as we get to know Dona Clara (Sônia Braga), a retired music writer in her mid-60s who outrightly refuses a […]