By Celluloid Liberation Front There are a limited amount of situations one can stage when endeavouring to show the daily routine of street junkies in a movie, and Heaven Knows What suffers from such limitation in its sincere but problematic attempt to chronicle the cyclical existence of a group of young addicts. Mood swings are…

By Michael Sicinski This well-received Un Certain Regard entry (the debut film from a protégée of Lee Chang-dong, who produced) has all the trappings of a serious festival entry, and it superficially shares a number of Lee’s thematic concerns: the big-city transplant stranded in a provincial backwater; the closed-minded, insular nature of said community of…

By Michael Sicinski First things first: this is a pretty good film. Granted, first-time feature director Kyle Thomas makes some strategic errors, most notably a decision to organize his film around semi-independent but ultimately intersecting characters and storylines, which is the last refuge of scoundrels and fiction-workshop MFAs. This manoeuvre has the unfortunate effect of…

By Tom Charity Abderrahmane Sissako’s first feature since 2007’s Bamako is a fleet, forceful response to the brief but traumatic few months in 2013 when foreign jihadists seized control of the northern Malian city and imposed Sharia law (an incursion that was eventually repelled by the former colonial power, France, which is where Sissako now…

By Shelly Kraicer Liew Seng Tat’s eagerly awaited follow up to his award-winning Flower in the Pocket sets out to be a boisterous comedy of rural cross-dressing and ghostly hauntings, but it has fascinating, somewhat disguised undercurrents suggesting something more serious. Pak Awang (a magisterial Wan Hanafi Su) is marrying off his daughter, who has…

By Kiva Reardon The Greengrass grows all over Yann Demange’s ’71, the latest example of a “historical” drama that believes that “immediacy” stripped of context equals the universal. Set in Troubles-troubled Belfast in the eponymous apostrophized year, the film follows a young English soldier, Gary Hook (Jack O’Connell), who gets separated from his unit after…

By Blake Williams It’s a sad sign of the state of Pedro Almodóvar’s career when one is more intrigued by the projects listing his name in their production credits than the ones he himself directed. This has as much to do with the rise of frequent collaborator Lucrecia Martel into one of world cinema’s juggernauts…

By Mallory Andrews “It’s fucking brave,” says Valentine (Kristine Stewart) in defense of actress Jo-Ann Ellis’ (Chloë Grace Moretz) performance in the latest Hollywood big-budget goofy sci-fi superhero flick. Her comment is directed at her employer, Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche, typecast as a legendary French actress), but it could very well be a salvo against…

By Adam Nayman David Cronenberg’s worst movie in fifteen years finds him playing his usual home game on foreign turf. Los Angeles in Maps to the Stars feels just as alienated and under-populated as New York in Cosmopolis (2012), which is of course the point—a point that was once novel but is getting tiresome. Also…

By José Teodoro Maya Forbes’ late ’70s-set semi-autobiographical first feature reflects on a childhood spent under the parentage of Maggie (Zoe Saldana) and Cam Stuart (Mark Ruffalo), the former an African-American woman of modest origins struggling to forge a career in law, the latter a scion of old American aristocracy whose bipolar disorder has rendered…