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Reviews

Nirvanna the Band The Show the Movie

Nirvanna the Band the Show The Movie is the feature-length spin-off of the abruptly cancelled, Vice-produced television series; which initially grew from the online brainchild of director Matt Johnson (The Dirties, Operation Avalanche, BlackBerry) and musician/composer Jay McCarrol (The Kid Detective). Just like their former antics on TV, Johnson and McCarrol take big swings with their movie: they’re attempting to project a niche property into the mainstream and hoping the general public will ride along, while also approaching the…

Reviews

Cold Storage

Much like the rampant sample of life-threatening Skylab fungus featured in Cold Storage, Jonny Campbell’s film moves like a sticky sludge with an unpredictable element that’s scratches our morbid curiousity. A substance that was once contained in the mid-2000s after an outbreak in Australia has seeped out of its enclosure and is infecting a business of self-storage units. The danger is gradually discovered by a patrolling night crew (Barbarian’s Georgina Campbell, Joe Keery of Netflix’s…

Reviews

Anything That Moves

When writer/director Alex Phillips hit the indie scene with his trippy feature-length debut All Jacked Up and Full of Worms, I was already exhausted by his provocative filmmaking. By using an unreliable narrative filled with hallucinatory visuals, over-the-top performances and uncomfortable humour to convey the desperate lives of junkies made for an agonizingly aimless and, quite frankly, offensive flick. But, for Phillips’ sophomore feature Anything That Moves, these traits and signatures are juxtaposed against the…

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Dead Man’s Wire

Since his biopic Milk, director Gus Van Sant hasn’t been involved with many buzzy projects. That luck may change with Dead Man’s Wire, a comic crime caper that marks a brilliant return for Sant. A bizarre, public kidnapping carried out by disgruntled developer Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgard of the modern It series) is the talk of the nation, as Kiritsis holds mortgage broker Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery of Netflix’s Stranger Things) at gunpoint. Richard, filling in for his…

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We Bury the Dead

Audiences looking for a different take on survival thrillers and disaster movies may be pleasantly surprised by Zak Hilditch’s We Bury the Dead. Likewise for horror hounds who have been thirsty for crushingly bleak imports from Australia. This is a stark, sick and slick flick. Daisy Ridley has gone from space (the Star Wars franchise) to the sea (Young Woman and the Sea) and, now, to sullen ground zero after a botched military weapon test levels…

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Nouvelle Vague

In a would-be layup to his terrific Blue Moon, Richard Linklater returns with a love letter to filmmaking in Nouvelle Vague. This meat-and-potatoes biopic covers the making-of Jean Luc-Godard’s Breathless, which would become a staple of French cinema’s Nouvelle Vague (the New Wave) movement. As a film critic for Cashiers du Cinema, Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) stews in pent-up jealousy as he observes his peers and their filmmaking aspirations. Though content with criticizing but itching for a challenge, Godard finally gains…

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Meadowlarks

Tasha Hubbard’s Meadowlarks is a dramatic narrative of the director’s award-winning documentary Birth of a Family. Hubbard portrays the same story of reunited First Nations siblings who were separated by the Sixties Scoop, as they spend a week in Banff to gain an intimate bond that was destroyed when they were relocated to different families. With the exception, however, of one heart-stricken brother who prefers to live life in the present instead of refacing on a…

Festival Coverage

Toronto After Dark 2025: Canada After Dark

The Toronto After Dark Film Festival has a firm commitment to giving short films a significant platform, and this year was no different. The shorts are peppered in throughout the festival – from short film programs to condensed genre flicks opening for much-anticipated features. The following are short films that were featured in the Canada After Dark showcase that are worth your time if you see them reappear on the festival circuit or an online…

Reviews

Blue Moon

It’s March 31, 1943, and Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) is chatting up the patrons at Sardi’s, a restaurant that will be hosting the production of Oklahoma! after their opening night. The buzz around this new musical is rumoured to be a hit for Hart’s collaborative composer Richard Rogers (Andrew Scott), who paired with Oscar Hammerstein II for this folksy endeavour. Hart, whether he knows it or not, tries to tune out and drown away his…

Addio Commentary

Lost Boys in a Not So Lost Era: A One-On-One with Joe Frantz

You’re a Millennial living through the aughts of Gen Z. You’re in high school, hastily finishing last week’s homework, and anticipating the wild shenanigans you’ll catch in the evening on MTV’s Jackass spin-off Viva La Bam, the network’s hit reality show starring skateboarder Bam Margera and his fellow band of Pennsylvanian misfits. In between harebrained spectacles and stunts, most likely involving destruction or pranks or both, rock and metal tunes would play over top of…