Cornish writer-director Mark Jenkin has, with his debut feature film Bait, created a daringly original and unique film that feels like a found artifact from an antiquated era. Shot on 16mm black-and-white Kodak film stock with a 43-year-old wind-up Bolex camera, there’s an unmistakable Dogme vibe to Jenkin’s class clash picture (Jenkin’s authored a very […]
VIFF 2019
Amanda – VIFF 2019 Review
The opening scenes of the new Mikhaël Hers drama Amanda depict a sun-soaked Paris that thrums with vivid life. The characters we meet may be mundane and prosaic, but that makes them all the more relatable. There’s David (Vincent Lacoste), a flighty twenty-something and sometimes arborist, who gets along well with his older, wiser, more […]
Babysplitters – VIFF 2019 Review
Writer-director Sam Friedlander’s refreshingly upbeat comedy sets its sights on the ambiguity couples often have over whether or not to have kids. Presenting itself as something of a modernized screwball comedy––and I’ll define that for people unfamiliar with the sometimes misused term; it’s a rom-com subgenre from the Golden Age of Hollywood that juxtaposes opposites […]
Deerskin – VIFF 2019 Review
Georges has a real killer look in writer/director Quentin Dupieux’s latest film, a batshit-beyond-all-reason black comedy/character piece called Deerskin. Dupieux, the deranged genius behind such wonderfully weird films as the absurdist horror tale Rubber (2010), and the irreverent comic mystery Wrong (2012) is no stranger to bizarre backroads and crackpot detours into the ludicrously far-out […]
Scarborough – VIFF 2019 Review
Adapted for the screen by director Barnaby Soutcombe (I, Anna [2012]) from Fiona Shaw’s 2008 play, Scarborough is a smart and slippery inquiry into two problematical student-teacher romances over three days in the eponymous coastal town of Scarborough, North Yorkshire. As the film opens we are greeted, along with Liz (Jodhi May) by a chatty […]
Paradise Hills – VIFF 2019 Review
Vivid colors and chic camera choreography are beautifully bound together in the initial scenes of Alice Waddington’s feature length directorial debut, the erratic yet always elegant sci-fantasy Paradise Hills. But it’s a film that opens perhaps too big; Waddington playfully presents a richly imagined world that’s part musical, part mystery, and overfull with intrigue and […]