Hungarian director and screenwriter László Nemes makes an astonishing debut – one of the greatest in recent memory – with the heart-rending and brutal Holocaust drama, Son of Saul. Much to Nemes credit he manages to eschew all the usual clichés telling the story of Saul (Géza Röhrig, brilliant), a Hungarian Jew forced to help […]
Author: Shane Scott-Travis
Into The Forest – VIFF 2015 Review
Alternating between somber and chimerical makes for an erratic and often heavy-handed ordeal in Canadian filmmaker Patricia Rozema’s (I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing) latest film, the dystopian drama, Into The Forest. It was the formidable lead actress, Ellen Page (Juno), who first brought the Jean Hegland novel about societal collapse and a return to nature, […]
Deathgasm – VIFF 2015 Review
If you’re of the belief that Kiwi splatter comedies have been beaten to death, then consider writer/director Jason Lei Howden’s Deathgasm a resurrection. Speaking straight to the outcast and ill at ease in us all, Howden heaves this mettlesome, indelicate and scatological midnight movie masterpiece all over us, and it’s a satiating mess. Combining the […]
Crumbs – VIFF 2015 Review
Crumbs is a fascinating and at times even astonishing directorial debut from Ethiopian filmmaker Miguel Llansó. Part post-apocalyptic melodrama, part peculiar pop culture collateral as objet d’art obiter dictum, Crumbs is a bedtime story for children of the far future. Telling the surreal yet straight-faced journey of the diminutive Birdy (Daniel Tadesse), whose beloved, Candy […]
High-Rise – VIFF 2015 Review
English novelist J.G. Ballard broke away from writing science fiction novels with a string of confrontational and controversial novels in the 1970s, which included The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Crash (1973), and High-Rise (1975). These postmodernist tomes proved auspicious and acclaimed, and, as David Cronenberg would discover with his 1996 adaptation of Crash, despite what backseat […]
Green Room – VIFF 2015 Review
The teeth-baring ferociousness on sharp-edged display in Jeremy Saulnier‘s intense new film, Green Room, rivals his previous film, 2014’s Blue Ruin, making it catnip for extreme action thriller devotees. Fascinating, forcible, and rough, Saulnier offers a punk rock variant on Rio Bravo – with a likeable rabble impossibly endangered in an under siege scenario – […]