Early on in Ryan McKenna’s (The First Winter) thoughtful, candy-colored tragicomedy, Sabali, Jeannette (Marie Brassard), our put upon protagonist, tells a customer at the hotel where she works that she has a bad heart. This omission is both physically and metaphorically accurate as McKenna takes delight in exploring this eccentric woman in her journey to […]
Author: Shane Scott-Travis
Los Parecidos (The Similars) – VIFF 2015 Review
Mexico’s Isaac Ezban is two for two with his exhilarant follow-up to last year’s festival front-runner The Incident, the correspondingly science fiction-y mind-manipulator The Similars. Right out of the gate writer/director Ezban declares a wistful throwback via voiceover to the glory days of televised psychological suspense fare like The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone. […]
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The 30 Best Movies About Doubles And Doppelgangers
Doppelgängers, doubles, and evil twins. Such notions have been a feint of storytelling for centuries. Shakespeare explored it in “The Comedy of Errors”, as did Alexandre Dumas in “The Man in the Iron Mask”, and both Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” and Poe’s “William Wilson” exploited the idea just ahead of Dostoevsky’s famed and […]
Aaaaaaaah! – VIFF 2015 Review
Aaaaaaaah! is adventurous and bombastic postmodern cinema, full stop. Puritans, the easily offended, the mild-mannered and the populist filmgoer need not apply. And this, trust me, is a very good thing. Steve Oram, best known as the co-writer/co-star of Ben Wheatley’s unruly serial killer comedy Sightseers as well as a string of lacerating comedic shorts, […]
Ninth Floor – VIFF 2015 Review
Previously held in celebrated esteem as an indie filmmaker of fiction, Mina Shum (Double Happiness) makes a fearless ascent into non-fiction with the tender and deep-toned Ninth Floor. Shum’s sentient gaze makes for tout de suite intelligence as she smoothly sweeps up the viewer from the outset, revisiting a scandalous episode of institutionalized racism, the […]
Le Dep – VIFF 2015 Review
Quebec filmmaker Sonia Bonspille Boileau’s debut, Le Dep, is an intentionally intimate and small-scale affair with worry on its mind and an upset heart that, sadly, strains to get the necessary birr to really resonate with the audience. That’s not to say it’s a lacklustre affair, it’s got more than a few stirring minutes and […]