By Josh Lewis Oskar Schindler looms large in the cinematic memory of Righteous Among the Nations recipients, an honorific title given to gentiles who performed extraordinarily risky acts to save Jews from death during the Holocaust. The aim of Irena’s Vow appears to be to elevate Irene Gut Opdyke’s name to that same status. Based…

By Josh Lewis There are few cinematic tools that provide as immediate elevation to a premise as the train setting does. The inherent sense of motion, propulsion, and time that it can provide a thriller especially is indispensable, which is what makes Indian filmmaker Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s bluntly titled Kill—lost somewhere between an incredibly generic,…

By Josh Lewis “People die, remember?” East Coast island mayor Bobby (Clayne Crawford) calmly has to remind his wife Grace (Lara Jean Chorostecki) in The King Tide—a new slow burn quasi-folk horror indie drama from Newfoundland & Labrador-born director Christian Sparkes. At that point, Bobby’s community has been struggling against the increasing influence of mainland…

Since beginning his feature directorial career in 2002 with Beneath Clouds, Australian writer-director Ivan Sen has carved out a space for himself as one of his country’s prominent post-colonial filmmakers, taking familiar plot strands from coming-of-age, crime and road movies and giving them a meditative atmosphere concerned with the specific identity crisis at the intersection of the historical racist abuse and barren landscapes of the Outback.

By Josh Lewis The Midnight Madness program at TIFF wouldn’t be complete without at least one anxiety-inducing, run-all-night thriller, and this year’s comes courtesy of Saudi Arabian filmmaker Meshal Aljaser, who’s managed to find a specific spin on it: taking the relationship between rebellious daughter (Sara, played with a determined, frustrated intensity by Adwa Bader)…

By Josh Lewis Of the dozen or so actor-turned-director features at TIFF this year few had as endearing a concept as Poolman; a Big Lewbowski-esque paranoid stoner-noir with a long-haired, short-shorts-attired Chris Pine as the himbo-goofball city council activist/pool cleaner Darren Barrenman (aka DB), who stumbles upon a literal Chinatown LA water conspiracy. Unfortunately, movies…

By Josh Lewis  Among Netflix’s many crimes against artistry (the algorithmic dumping ground they greet their acquisitions with, back in the news: not paying their creatives fairly, etc.), one of the more underrated is their absorption of the trashy, stylish genre programmer. Back in the day, a comically bleak piece of Southern Gothic exploitation like…

By Josh Lewis Since Fire on the Plains (2014) and Killing (2018), legendary Japanese cult filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto—more commonly known for his grotesquely textured, sexually repressed science-fiction and horror films—has found himself obsessed with and lost in the tormented ruins of post-war Japan. Shadow of Fire specifically concerns itself with the innocence of a child…

The hermetic, ensemble classroom setting has long served as an easy access point for filmmakers to make microcosmic sociological observations about The State of Things, or locate that particularly stressful, malleable time when people are typically having their first experiences with complex adult interactions, institutional politics, and rebellion.

By Josh Lewis Fantasy and class are the name of the game in Zachary Wigon’s claustrophobic chamber thriller Sanctuary. Similarly to his debut 2014 feature The Heart Machine—which took a bleak look at the impulse to be romantically dishonest about your online vs. physical self—Sanctuary centers itself around a crumbling hermetic relationship afraid to move…

By Josh Lewis “This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure” is how German writer Erich Maria Remarque opened All Quiet on the Western Front, his fictional recounting of the torturously bleak experience of serving in the trenches of WWI at the age of 18. The…

By Josh Lewis A COVID lockdown protocol slasher might sound like a tough sell to a moviegoing public not particularly enthusiastic about going back to the days of toilet paper shortages even in our entertainment. Still, in the hands of legendary teen meta-horror scribe Kevin Williamson and underrated direct-to-video action director John Hyams, Sick is…

By Josh Lewis Spanish writer-director Cesc Gay returns to Toronto for the seventh(!) time with this unconventional anthology of awkward, overlit romantic comedy encounters that are meant to reveal the complicated histories and immature choices that we try to cover up and ultimately form the foundations of how we navigate our daily lives. Despite his…

By Josh Lewis  Montreal, 1984. A world of hounding landlords, drag-show auditions, and desperate children in search of family according to this debut comic-drama about living on the economic and cultural fringes from Métis filmmaker Gail Maurice. Due to a few bureaucratic child service technicalities, Rosie (Keris Hope Hill), a bright and precocious Indigenous orphan,…