The last time director Antoine Fuqua and actor Denzel Washington teamed up, back in 2001, Washington ended up scoring a Best Actor Oscar trophy for delivering some of his best work as a manipulative and smooth-talking crooked cop in the urban thriller Training Day. Though Washington has continued to turn in solid-to-great performances since then, Fuqua has not been nearly as lucky professionally, becoming…
Having been put on the map by Coraline and Paranorman, stop-motion studio Laika returns with The Boxtrolls, a film which, while ostensibly possessing the same eye-catching visuals as the studio’s previous features, mostly feels warmed over, calling to mind not only both its predecessors, but also…
For an actor, part of the art of embodying a morally questionable character is to first seek a point of empathy rather than glaring signs of weakness — to make a bid to understand character flaws rather than hastily inflate them. This is what separates nuanced…
The handheld, behind-the-head following shot loosely trailing a character in movement is often a staple of nonjudgmental, naturalistic filmmaking, coming as it does with a built-in implication of directorial humility. It’s an approach that relinquishes autonomy to the body being photographed rather than the…
After opening with a swaggering bit of drunken police violence, Scott Frank’s A Walk Among the Tombstones spends its runtime bathing in its characters’ moral and psychological muck. With a grimy, pre-Y2K New York as its setting — updating Lawrence Block’s 1992 novel by seven years…
Whether or not you like Terry Gilliam’s films, you have to feel some kind of affinity for the man himself, what with his dogged determination in the face of projects both woefully unrealized (The Man Who Killed Don Quixote) and tragically unlucky (2009’s The…
In the opening of The Guest, a stranger pays a visit to a grieving family. “David” (Dan Stevens) arrives on the Petersons’ doorstep claiming to be a friend of their son Caleb, a soldier recently killed in action. Hesitantly at first but then more…
If you have any plans to see Bird People, Pascale Ferran’s whimsical study of mid-life dissatisfaction and the various methods we all use to abate its influence, try to go in as cold as possible. The film, as flawed as it is, becomes more…
The scenario behind Leigh Janiak’s debut feature Honeymoon is one of the most common in the horror genre: A newlywed couple spends their honeymoon at a cabin in the woods and everything goes horribly wrong. But while it never goes so far as to…
With a film festival as stacked to the gills as the TIFF, thematic trends are bound to pop up. Last year, doppelgängers appeared to be a trend, with films like Enemy, The Double and A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness. This year, with…
