“Nothing will make sense to your American ears, and you will doubt everything we tell you,” intones Alejandro (Benicio del Toro) gravely, “but in the end you will understand.” A former prosecutor, now an inscrutable consultant for an elite U.S. governmental task force, Alejandro uses a quiet, almost ataractic emphasis as he speaks to Kate […]
Author: Shane Scott-Travis
- Features
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15 Outstanding Films from VIFF 2015: The Best of the Fest
Now that the 34th annual Vancouver International Film Festival (which ran from September 24th to October 9th, 2015) has drawn to a close, Taste of Cinema offers up our choice favorites from what was a prodigious and impressive festival. While there were many excellent and outstanding non-fiction films – Su Rynard’s The Messenger, Mia Shum’s […]
Anomalisa – VIFF 2015 Review
Anomalisa is that rare film that mingles high ambition with near errorless achievement. Few directors, in this case two, Duke Johnson, and Charlie Kaufman (Synecdoche, New York), would have undertaken such a risky project, one hinging on a nominal sketch, basically, and complete it with such a stunning success. The most initially striking thing about […]
Songs My Brothers Taught Me – VIFF 2015 Review
A longing for independence, direction, and a youthful exhilaration are at the crux of Chloé Zhao piercingly sad yet stunningly beautiful debut feature, Songs My Brothers Taught Me. As it’s lyrical handle suggest, there’s an austere approach to Zhao’s portrait of life on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, and the story is […]
Experimenter – VIFF 2015 Review
Somber yet simultaneously mischievous, Michael Almereyda’s (Nadja) latest and most vigorous picture yet, Experimenter, is a visually and verbally spellbinding showpiece. Beginning in 1961 at Yale, renowned social psychologist Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard) wielded the baton on a series of psychological experiments in which subjects believed they were administering electrical shocks to an amiable and […]
The Lobster – VIFF 2015 Review
The Lobster gets its epithet from its conscience-stricken central character, David (Colin Farrell), who has chosen the marine crustacean as the animal he will become if, after 45 days at the hotel resort he’s staying at, he hasn’t found a mate. His reasons for wanting to be a lobster are two fold; they have a […]