TIFF 2021: Steve Pink’s ‘The Wheel’ Scratches at Love’s Wounds
Director Steve Pink’s clear-eyed look at intimate relationships, The Wheel, playing at TIFF 2021, is as much about its audience as its characters.
Film
When You’re Strange: 5 Gen X Films That Shaped My Goth Goth Heart
Gen X kids of single working moms like me had to figure a lot of things out themselves. These five films helped make sense of the world – outside and inside.
Fantasia 2021: ‘Voice of Silence’ Quietly Speaks Volumes
Ostensibly a crime film, Director Hong Eui-jeon’s ‘Voice of Silence’, playing at Fantasia 2021, has a feminine sensitivity that wraps its arms around viewers.
James Wan’s ‘Malignant’ Is Perfectly HorrorAble
At first you might think that James Wan’s Malignant is striking the same note as his prior horror films. You would be wrong.
TIFF 2021: Women’s Intellectual Freedom and The Mad Women’s Ball
Director Mélanie Laurent’s The Mad Women’s Ball (TIFF 2021) is an unsettling work about two precocious women that are held down by patriarchal society.
Fantasia 2021: Ruth Platt on Directing Horror Film ‘Martyrs Lane’ Without Fear
Director Ruth Platt talks with PopMatters about women filmmakers using the system while subverting it to empower their voice.
Venice 2021: ‘The Card Counter’ Is a Teeth-Grinding Royal Flush
Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter finds Oscar Isaac at his mercurial best and presents yet another triumph of the writer/director’s tongue-in-cheek cynicism.
Fantasia 2021: The Occult Possesses the Drama of ‘The Righteous’
Director Mark O’Brien’s The Righteous, playing at Fantasia 2021, is a quiet and conversationally brooding work.
Director Filip Jan Rymsza on the Descent into Madness in Thriller ‘Mosquito State’
Filip Jan Rymsza’s thriller Mosquito State amps up hyper-reality in a cautionary tale of what the 24-hour news cycle is doing to our brains.
Venice 2021: ‘Spencer’ Is a Majestic Arthouse Farce that Keeps Its Distance
Kristen Stewart embodies the distraught Lady Diana in Pablo Larraín’s Spencer, an audacious chamber piece that fetishizes the woman it seeks to liberate.
Venice 2021: Villeneuve’s ‘Dune’ Stirs up the Grit
Villeneuve’s ‘Dune’ (Venice International Film Festival 2021) looks the part and will not disappoint fans, but it groans under the weight of its world-building.