Following her breakout film, the high school cannibal romp Raw (2016), filmmaker Julia Ducournau doubles down on her predilections for freely reconstructed human flesh. The Palme d’Or–winning Titane strays even further from traditional narrative logic, emerging as a baroque investigation of the power of bodies to morph in response to the desires and violence of both people and machines. Taking its title from the metal plate installed in a young girl’s head after her father (Bertrand Bonello, in a fun bit of casting) crashes their car amid her aggressive fury, it is, yes, the movie where a woman fucks a […]

The complexities, uncertainties and rivalries of young female friendship are explored in heightened, near-surreal ways in Sarah Adina Smith’s ballet-school drama, Birds of Paradise, now playing on Amazon Prime. Working-class Kate (Diana Silvers) is the awkward newcomer at a somewhat gothic Parisian dance academy, and she’s immediately thrust into competition with Marine (Kristine Froseth), the talented, beautiful and mercurial daughter of the American French ambassador. The two women, placed together as roommates, quickly bond, however, following a competitive dance-off in a psychedelic dance club, a night-long endurance test that Smith cleverly constructs along the lines of the classic game-theory test, […]

A 2nd unit DP must be a chameleon who can bend their own style to the shape of the main unit cinematographer. For Australian DP Ross Emery, that can mean replicating the regimented classical approach of someone like William Fraker on one picture, then recreating the instinctual fluidity of Dariusz Wolski on the next. For his latest project, Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Emery once again finds himself emulating main unit cinematographer Bill Pope, who he collaborated with on The Matrix trilogy two decades ago. Emery —whose career includes main unit DP credits on The Wolverine […]

A veteran screenwriter and, more recently, an accomplished director, James DeMonaco has had a prolific career most commonly associated with The Purge franchise. Spanning five films and a television series, The Purge marked DeMonaco’s sophomore directorial outing and, aided by the upstart production company, Blumhouse, saw the filmmaker’s first box-office hit. DeMonaco, who also directed the second and third entries in the series, continues with the franchise, as a screenwriter, to this day (a rumored sixth installment is currently in the works). However, ties to his hometown of Staten Island remain at the forefront of DeMonaco’s creative endeavours, and his […]

In the summer of 1997, a season characterized by gargantuan spectacles like The Lost World, Con Air, The Fifth Element, and Batman and Robin, a modest thriller by an unknown young director surprised audiences, critics and probably even its own financiers by becoming a sleeper hit thanks to its classical virtues and relentless determination to put the viewer in the palm of its hand and squeeze. The film, Breakdown, began when Dino de Laurentiis hired low-budget filmmaker Jonathan Mostow to write and direct a new adaptation of Stephen King’s short story “Trucks,” which King had already directed himself as Maximum […]

Winner of both the Emerging Canadian Filmmaker Award and the Rogers Audience Award at this year’s Hot Docs, Kímmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning of Empathy is the latest documentary from multifaceted artist Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers (The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open, which was picked up by Ava DuVernay’s ARRAY after its 2019 Berlinale premiere and is available to stream on Netflix). A writer, director, producer and actor – she currently stars in Danis Goulet’s Night Raiders, which just debuted at TIFF – Tailfeathers is also a member of the Kainai First Nation in Alberta. It’s a community that continues to be ravaged by […]

On a microbudget feature with a skeleton crew, you often end up wearing multiple hats. But a different metaphor is required to describe cinematographer Jeremy Mackie’s contribution to Language Lessons. It’s more like Mackie made the hats from scratch, then mailed them to the actors with instructions on how to wear them. The film stars Mark Duplass as a grieving Angeleno who platonically bonds with his Costa Rican tutor (Natalie Morales, who also directed) via Zoom during weekly Spanish immersion lessons. Though the movie—which debuted at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival before playing South by Southwest—never mentions Covid, it’s […]

Civil War (or, Who Do We Think We Are), the latest doc from Rachel Boynton (Big Men, Our Brand Is Crisis) unfolds in a series of revelations. The project was sparked in the wake of the slaughter of Black parishioners at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC during President Obama’s last year in office,and continued right through the domestic terrorism of the Trump administration. During that time Boynton took a historical journey, traversing the US from Massachusetts to Mississippi, with a singular question in mind: What’s the story of the Civil War? Or more precisely, What’s your story of the […]

Justin Chon first came to the world’s attention playing Eric Yorkie, a supporting character in the Twilight movies. The global success of that young-vampires-in-love franchise helped Chon land lead roles in films such as 21 & Over, Revenge of the Green Dragons, and Seoul Searching, but all the while, the freshly minted movie star was honing his craft as a writer and director. First came 2015’s little-seen Man Up (“That was my film school”), then the breakthrough of Gook, which won the NEXT Audience Award at Sundance in 2017. A bracing look at the 1992 Rodney King riots from a […]

A son’s search for a father he never knew is an emotional and complicated journey in even the best of circumstances. When that dad is a smalltime hitman murdered in Tijuana who left behind another family, including a son who likewise embraced criminality and his own father who supposedly fought for Castro (and also worked for the CIA), that investigation can become something infinitely more complex. And if that child is a brave and thoughtful filmmaker like Monterrey-based Gian Cassini it transforms into a journey much greater than the sum of its tabloid-sensational parts: a study of intergenerational violence, machismo […]