Our fourth dispatch from the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival (here’s our first, our second, and our third) skews heavily Canadian: Atom Egoyan’s latest, lurid work, Guest of Honour; Matthew Rankin’s Midnight Madness entry and Guy Maddin riff, The Twentieth Century; Calvin Thomas and…
I don’t know much about the history of the co-op farming system in Iceland— which began in the 19th century and persisted for decades before largely collapsing in the 1990’s— and Grimur Hakonarson’s new film, The County, doesn’t do much to change that. Loosely…
There was no way that we were going to escape the first four years of the Trump presidency without Alex Gibney making a documentary about one of its numerous scandals. Just as predictably perhaps, Gibney opts to turn his focus on the spectre of…
Calvin Thomas and Lev Lewis have been at the heart of the burgeoning Canadian independent film scene over the past few years, with their 2018 film Spice It Up serving as a kind of summation of the movement’s interest in the intersection of performance…
The Last Porno Show opens with shots of both hardcore pornography and an aerial view of a man graphically masturbating in a movie theater. It is a bold move, one that promises the viewer a bit of raunchy nastiness. But writer-director Kire Paputts is…
If you took the most deplorable elements of today’s rap scene — the rampant misogyny, the nihilistic attitude towards putting any visible effort into anything, and the blatant non-creativity of most up-and-comers who are perfectly content being a Future or Migos clone —combined them,…
