Category: Reviews

Reviews of movies, television, games, and whatever else strikes our fancy.

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Vancouver Just For Laughs Film Festival: ‘Bernadette’ is sweet, but slightly confused

Bernadette / Sam Straley & James Psathas

Movies that don’t evoke a strong reaction are the most difficult for me to write about. It’s hard not to oversell the good and bad stuff and create an impression that something is better or much worse than it actually is. Bernadette is a movie like this. It’s well-produced, shot, and acted, and also is feels slightly confused about what it wants to be.

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Marvel’s Spider-Man Makes You Feel Like You’re Spider-Man

Spider-Man

There aren’t that many games that I would consider to be among my favourite games of all time. I have played games on various platforms since I was a kid, but not a lot of them have really stuck with me. The ones that have though have generally stuck because they resonated with me on some deeper level. _Firewatch_ is a great recent example of this, a game that made me cry in its text-based introductory chapter and punched me directly in the emotions at the climax. _Bioshock_ is another, a game that scared me relentlessly for hours before unveiling one of the best video game story twists of all time.

I’ve been thinking about these games for the past few days because I am pretty sure that _Marvel’s Spider-Man_ on the PlayStation 4 is going to end up on my list of all time favourite games.

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Review: ‘Ant-Man & The Wasp’ delivers big with small stakes

The first **Ant-Man** is a good film. Immediately following **Avengers: Age of Ultron** is was light, funny, full of great performances, and had refreshingly small, personal stakes. **Ant-Man & The Wasp** continues these traditions: it’s a light, funny movie with some great performances, smaller, more personal stakes, and it immediately followed **Avengers: Infinity War** which had literal end-of-the-entire-universe stakes. Is this new entry in the Marvel experiment good though? Yes, yes it is! Is it better than the last one? Well… maybe?

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Review: ‘Hereditary’ is the scariest movie I’ve seen all year

You should go into this as cold as possible. I’m here to tell you that it is good and it is scary and you should see it. I will tell you why I believe these things but, honestly, anything I might say might spoil at least some of the experience for you so you’re better off taking my word for it and just seeing it. But I you really must know, bring the family to read the rest of this. It’s very important you bring your whole family.

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Review: ‘Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’ actually kinda sorta works

**Jurassic Park** is a great movie. More than that, it is one of my favourite movies. You can debate its quality if you like –I know that plenty of people rank it in the middle of Spielberg’s filmography– but for me it is the film that made me believe in movie magic. I feel it’s important that you know this going into this review, and that you also know that none of the films in the rest of the franchise come close to recapturing that original magic, and that includes this one.

This one at least tries to do something new and different, so that’s something.

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Review: A Quiet Place

There’s a section in the second act of *A Quiet Place* where everyone I could see in the cinema had their hands clamped over their mouth. It’s a strange thing to be in a room full of people sat in total silence, straining to watch a movie that is desperate in its own absolute quiet. This is *A Quiet Place*, John Krasinski’s directorial debut, at its very best – tension gnawing through the screen, audience in the palm of its hand, waiting for the inevitable snap.

And snap it does.

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Review: Thor Ragnarok

I really miss the sci-fi movies of my childhood. Big, colourful, often funny, always exhilarating; so much fuel for imaginary spaceship battles around my bedroom. I’m sure much of this comes from older eyes and wearier brains, but I find sci-fi these days to be too bland, too unwilling to risk shapes and ideas. The resurgence of *Star Wars* has taken big steps back to the fantasy side of sci-fi, and *Guardians Of The Galaxy* got close with its amazing ship design and snappy script, but I often felt myself seeking more of the *fun*.

Well, not any more. We’ve known for a while that *Thor Ragnarok* would be colourful and funny – director Taika Waititi’s *What We Do In The Shadows* is one of my all-time favourite comedies – but what I was not prepared for was *Ragnarok* having *so* much more. Far from being all-out comedy, it’s a meaty, gorgeous slice of sci-fi bliss.

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VIFF Review: ‘Wonderstruck’ is a magical, moving tale for all ages

Todd Haynes movies, love ’em or … not? Wait, does anyone not love Todd Haynes movies? Anyway, the point is that the man is a consummate visual storyteller, and in that regard, Wonderstruck might be his magnum opus. There are two main stories, one set in the 1970s and another in the 1920s, each with a child protagonist and each moving in their own ways. If you think that they might be connected, yes, of course, they are both to each other, and a third story told later in the film.

It would have been easy to adapt this story, a kids novel, for kids, but Wonderstruck is a moving tale for all ages.

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VIFF Review: ‘Columbus’ is one of the years best

It’s easy to say that _Columbus_ is architecture porn for one good reason: it _is_ architecture porn. Video essayist Kogonada’s feature film début frames buildings in ways that I can’t recall seeing them framed before: not only in just the right light and at just the right angle, but with just the right context. This is why it’s misleading to say that it is architecture porn: because it’s so much more than that.

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VIFF Review: ‘Lipstick Under My Burkha’ is hilarious, heartbreaking, and hopeful

_Lipstick Under My Burkha_ is a hilarious movie that explores women’s daily lives in India. It’s also a heartbreaking movie that explores the daily lives of women in India. It’s a movie that has to be hilarious because if it weren’t, it would just be heartbreaking, and it’s important that this story ends with some hope.

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VIFF Review: ‘A Fantastic Woman’ is a beautiful, important movie

An older man, Orlando, spends a day at a spa and then heads to a nightclub to see a woman sing. She is his girlfriend Marina, and they are very much in love. After the performance, he takes her to dinner, and later at home, they make love against the floor to ceiling windows of their shared apartment. Later that night, he falls ill, and they rush to a hospital where he dies, and she is immediately treated like a criminal. Not, however, because of the bruises on his torso and the impact wound on his head he obtained from falling down the stairs on their way to the car, but because she is transgender.

The rest of _A Fantastic Woman_ follows Marina as she copes with losing the love of her life and coping with the prejudices of the doctors, the police, and the bulk of her lovers family. It’s not the easiest watch, but it’s a vital one.

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VIFF Review: ‘Borg vs. McEnroe’ is frustratingly not quite good (but Shia LaBeouf is great in it)

The rivalry between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe was one of the ages, and their match at the 1980 Wimbledon Championship is probably one of the greatest matches in tennis history. On track to win his fifth consecutive title, Borg had a reputation as being cool and graceful under pressure. McEnroe, the newcomer at the beginning of his ascendancy, had a reputation as a hothead who regularly threw tantrums on the court and argued with umpires. Even their styles of play were opposite, with Borg playing from the baseline and McEnroe rushing to the net. Literally, everything about this match makes it ripe for a great movie which is why it’s so frustrating that it isn’t one.

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