There’s an inherent contradiction in committing live theatre to film. Part of the magic of the stage is its impermanence: every performance exists for one audience, on one night, with subtle variations that can never be entirely replicated. Put cameras in the room, however, and that fleeting experience suddenly becomes permanent. It’s a contradiction that…
Few performers could claim the type of year Anne Hathaway has enjoyed. Across five major releases – Mother Mary, The Devil Wears Prada 2, The Odyssey, The End of Oak Street and Verity – the Academy Award winner has moved between wildly different characters and filmmakers, revisited one of the most beloved roles of her…
Rob Riggle may be best known for his comedic work, but in Nickels, the actor taps into a far quieter and more dramatic register as Tom Monroe, a successful entrepreneur and devoted family man still carrying the grief of losing his older brother as a teenager. When, three decades later, his neighbour’s son Mitch (Aaron…
John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein’s Mayday may wear the familiar uniform of an old-school 1980s buddy movie, but beneath the action, comedy and Cold War absurdity is a surprisingly tender story about two men questioning the lives they were taught to want. Ryan Reynolds stars as Lieutenant Troy “Assassin” Kelly, a hotshot U.S. Navy…
God Bless You, Mr Kopu may unfold like a darkly comic genre piece about ambition, desperation and the seductive promise of success, but beneath its increasingly twisted surface, writer-director Alex Liu is asking a more personal question: how much of yourself are you willing to surrender to become the person you think you’re supposed to…
Robert Pattinson has rarely seemed interested in taking the most obvious route into a character. Across a career increasingly defined by peculiar, unpredictable and sometimes deeply uncomfortable performances, the actor has demonstrated a willingness to disappear into characters without necessarily explaining them. For Primetime, though, Pattinson initially wasn’t planning on disappearing into anyone at all….
To look at Ken Carter’s 90-foot ramp jutting into the Canadian skyline was to look at a monument to sheer impossibility. In The Stunt Driver, filmmaker Michael Dowse dives headfirst into the folklore of Canada’s most audacious stunt performer, who, battered by decades of broken bones, staked his survival on jumping a mile across the…
There’s something inherently dangerous about satire when the person holding the knife is willing to turn it back on themselves. That tension sits at the centre of Everybody Wants to F*ck Me, the provocative new film from writer-director Jonathan Schey, which arrived at the Toronto International Film Festival with Taron Egerton stepping into the uncomfortable…
Onwards and Sideways may begin with a diagnosis, but its beating heart lies in everything that diagnosis cannot define. Oscar-nominated director John Madden’s tender, unexpectedly funny drama stars Rhys Ifans and Laura Linney as Tony and Emma, two strangers diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at the same clinic on the same morning. What initially binds them…
Diagnosed with the same degenerative disease, at the same clinic, on the same day, Tony (Rhys Ifans) and Emma (Laura Linney) may suddenly find themselves bound by Parkinson’s, but Onwards and Sideways is far more interested in everything that makes their experiences entirely their own. For Oscar-nominated director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love, Proof), that…
Friendships don’t necessarily end with an argument or betrayal. Sometimes life simply starts pulling two people in different directions, and the fear of what might be lost along the way can prove just as painful. That anxiety sits at the emotional centre of DreamWorks Animation’s Forgotten Island, a vibrant fantasy adventure that sends lifelong best…
Growing older has a way of revealing which friendships were chapters and which became part of the entire story. Or, as Forgotten Island co-director Januel Mercado rather wonderfully puts it, perhaps we’re not getting old so much as we’ve simply “been younger, longer.” That perspective feels particularly fitting for DreamWorks Animation’s latest original adventure, a…
Family can make us feel safest, but it can also reopen wounds we thought had long since healed. That tension sits at the heart of River, the nerve-shredding feature debut from writer-director Joshua Giuliano, which celebrated its world premiere at Midnight Madness at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Jane Levy, Jessica Rothe and Max…
There’s a necessary emotional armour that comes with spending your life staring at the worst things human beings can do. In The Girl in the River, Devon Sawa’s seasoned criminologist has learned to treat death, violence and unimaginable crime as simply part of the job. But when that carefully cultivated detachment is shattered by the…
For all the Hadoukens, roundhouses and larger-than-life personalities synonymous with Street Fighter, Noah Centineo sees something surprisingly vulnerable underneath Ken Masters’ famous bleached-blonde exterior. Set in 1993, Street Fighter reunites the estranged Ryu (Andrew Koji) and Ken Masters (Centineo) when the mysterious Chun-Li (Callina Liang) recruits them for the World Warrior Tournament. What initially promises…
Few films arrive quietly when they star Armie Hammer. Citizen Vigilante, the latest provocation from writer-director Uwe Boll, certainly hasn’t. The controversial thriller stars Hammer as Sanders, a self-appointed vigilante who hunts violent criminals and dispenses his own uncompromising version of justice. As his actions turn him into a hero to some and a dangerous…
The act of speaking out is so often framed as an inherently empowering one. But what happens when telling your story comes with the threat of financial ruin, public vilification, exile, or years spent defending the very fact that you chose to speak at all? That question sits at the unsettling heart of Silenced, the…
For Olympic gold medalist Jessie Diggins, the “pain cave” has long represented the place an elite athlete willingly enters when the body is screaming to stop, but the mind insists it can keep going. In Threshold, that celebrated capacity to endure takes on a far more complicated meaning. Unfolding across a single high-stakes cross-country ski…
History may be written in retrospect, but Annemarie Jacir has little interest in treating it as something safely contained in the past. With Palestine 36, the acclaimed Palestinian writer-director behind Wajib and When I Saw You turns her attention to the Arab Revolt of the 1930s, crafting an intimate yet expansive portrait of ordinary people…
More than a quarter of a century after Memento announced Christopher Nolan as one of cinema’s most audacious storytellers, the fractured psychological thriller is being pulled apart and put back together once again – only this time, rhythm is rewriting the equation. For the latest presentation from Hear My Eyes, Michael “CAVS” Cavanagh, drummer for…
Before Anthony Bourdain became the unmistakable voice, world traveller and cultural figure audiences came to know, he was a restless 19-year-old trying to work out where he belonged. Matt Johnson’s Tony captures that formative summer in Provincetown, where an unexpected introduction to the chaotic world of restaurant kitchens would quietly set his life on an…
Michael Bisping knows a thing or two about taking a hit. But carrying an action film on his shoulders? That presented the former UFC champion with an entirely different kind of pressure. In Atlas King, Bisping steps into the title role as a former fighter drawn back into a world he thought he had escaped….
Being called a mooch isn’t usually the type of insult one spends a decade transforming into a feature film, but Jeff Ryan has never seemed particularly interested in taking the expected route. Following YouthMin: A Mockumentary and the horror-comedy Mean Spirited, Ryan once again writes, directs and stars in Mooch (read our full review here),…
Seduction is rarely just about sex in Corpus. It’s about power, desire, vulnerability, and that dangerous willingness to ignore the warning signs when what’s waiting on the other side is attractive enough. Set against the sultry haze of upstate New York in 1998, Corrin Evans’ feature directorial debut lures Sayo (Jeff Wahlberg), his increasingly famous…
A certain amount of beautiful stupidity comes with believing your teenage band could actually become something. That blind conviction – the kind that tells you stealing a car and driving across America might somehow be a perfectly reasonable response to an invitation to open for Green Day – sits at the heart of Nimrods, writer-director…
From The Wedding Planner and Bringing Down the House to the gloriously larger-than-life musicality of Hairspray, Adam Shankman has spent decades making studio comedies designed, above all else, to entertain. But for his latest film, Stop! That! Train!, the director traded the machinery of a major Hollywood production for a 19-day independent shoot, a train…
If there was ever a role designed to weaponise Brooke Lynn Hytes’ statuesque presence, impeccable posture and bone-dry delivery, it’s Amber, the gloriously condescending first-class attendant she plays in Stop! That! Train! Directed by Hairspray filmmaker Adam Shankman and produced by the team behind RuPaul’s Drag Race, the unabashedly camp disaster-movie spoof takes its cues…
There’s something inherently unsettling about the suburbs in the films of David Robert Mitchell. Familiar streets, quiet houses and seemingly ordinary neighbourhoods have a way of suggesting that something strange might be lurking just beyond the frame. With The End of Oak Street, the filmmaker behind It Follows and Under the Silver Lake takes that…
For countless families around the world, CoComelon is already an instantly recognisable part of childhood. Now, director Kat Good is taking JJ and his friends somewhere they’ve never been before: the big screen. Marking Good’s feature directorial debut, CoComelon: The Movie expands the preschool phenomenon into a colourful musical adventure that follows JJ (Connor Esterson)…
Pregnancy has long been fertile ground for horror cinema, but Son of Sara transforms familiar fears into something far more intimate. As Sara, a woman whose increasingly disturbing cravings coincide with the return of her estranged boyfriend and the terrifying possibility that something sinister is growing inside her, Chloe Van Landschoot delivers a performance that…
