Disaffected brothers Gummi (Sigurður Sigurjónsson) and Kiddi (Theodór Júlíusson) have spent the last 40 odd years at odds with one another until a scabie outbreak threatens their competing prized flocks of sheep. It may seem a thin premise to hang a tragicomic parable upon, but Icelandic writer/director Grímur Hákonarson (Summerland) is in full command of […]
Author: Shane Scott-Travis
The Daughter – VIFF 2015 Review
The Daughter is the searing directorial debut of Simon Stone (he also wrote the screenplay), and it’s an accomplished and echoing pièce de résistance from the word go. Inspired from the Henrik Ibsen play “The Wild Duck”, which Stone previously staged in 2011 — Stone is a venerated theater director — The Daughter is a […]
Observance – VIFF 2015 Review
“Just watch and report back, it’s that simple,” intones the rather tenebrous and passive voice of Parker’s employer over the telephone. Parker (Lindsay Farris) is a rather plebeian private investigator who is a bit of a wreck as of late, owing to the death of his young son and the failed marriage that accrued after […]
Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon – VIFF 2015 Review
Refracted through a wistfully nostalgic lens, Douglas Triola’s wonderfully titled documentary, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon, is an entertaining and often aggrandizing look back at the once popular publication. Fans of the now defunct satirical counterculture magazine that reached its zenith in the 1970s, and fizzled out by the late […]
Slackjaw – VIFF 2015 Review
What begins as a baffling yet amusing string of non sequitur vignettes, shot rough and strenuous in a camera-verite fashion, eventually and astonishingly is made coherent in Zach Weintraub’s audacious arthouse alternative, Slackjaw. Something of an anomaly on the American indie scene, Weintraub (Bummer Summer, You Make Me Feel So Young) delights in awkward social […]
Ville-Marie – VIFF 2015 Review
Quebecois director Guy Édoin trades in the bucolic setting of his first feature, 2011’s Wetlands, for the metropolitan Montreal borough of Ville-Marie for his ambitious, but ultimately overwrought ensemble drama follow-up. A passion piece akin to Paul Haggis’ sentimental oversell Crash, Ville-Marie similarly frames much of its plot around car crashes and how those tragedies […]