Elijah Wood sure has slipped comfortably into B-movies after his stint at the Shire, hasn’t he? When I first stumbled upon Open Windows, I was expecting something along the lines of Wood’s bomb-in-a-piano thriller Grand Piano. There are similarities: both films are quintessential B-thrillers, escalating a catchy premise into something tense (and a little silly).…
The story told in The Green Prince is an astonishing one. Nadav Schirman’s documentary unfolds like a great John le Carré novel, threading its way through the twists and turns that bind two men on opposite sides of the Israel/Palestine conflict. One is Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a prominent Hamas cleric, who spent…
The main point of comparison for most people reviewing It Follows is Halloween. Undeniably, David Robert Mitchell’s debut feature, an insidious, diamond-sharp indie horror flick, draws heavily from John Carpenter’s classic. That’s apparent from its opening frame, an image of an American suburban street whose expansive front lawns carpeted by auburn autumn leaves could be…
It’s fair to say that I walked into Mommy with high expectations. Xavier Dolan is an incredibly talented young director, and his third film, Laurence Anyways, is an all-time classic in my personal pantheon. Pretty much every Australian critic I know caught his latest at the Melbourne International Film Festival last year, and the responses…
Thanks to Madman Entertainment, ccpopculture has 3 DVDs of Nightcrawler to give away. “Nightcrawler is a pulse-pounding thriller set in the nocturnal underbelly of contemporary Los Angeles. In his Golden Globe-nominated performance, Jake Gyllenhaal is Lou Bloom, a driven young man desperate for work who discovers the high-speed world of L.A. crime journalism. Finding a…
As its title suggests, Dear White People is a statement as much as a film, tackling modern-day race relations. Justin Simien’s debut feature stages its satirical drama in Winchester University, a fictional American college where residential colleges are divided – and, ultimately, fractured – along race lines. Early on I fretted that its insistence on…
Towards the end of Noah Baumbach’s latest film, While We’re Young, protagonist Josh (Ben Stiller) laments the feeling of being a “child imitating an adult.” It’s a familiar, facile observation. It’s the kind of thing that people say when their life is absent real concerns – about money, illness or the like – and they’re…
Living is Easy with Eyes Closed resembles an old Polaroid of the Andalusian seaside, yellowed by the summer sun and age alike. Despite its title – cribbed from “Strawberry Fields Forever” –it cuts through any nostalgic haze to present a clear-eyed portrait of 1966 Spain, its beauty and its injustice. The story told is an…
Samba (Omar Sy) and Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) are two people on the edge. Samba, an illegal immigrant whose spent the past decade in France, lives with the perpetual threat of deportation, while Alice, his caseworker, lives with a mental illness that recently culminated in a breakdown which put her career in jeopardy. Each of them…
Xavier Dolan’s fifth film, Mommy – released when the director was only twenty-five – is certainly his most mature work of an already outstanding filmography. An intimate portrait of the tenuous triangle formed between Die (Anne Dorval), her ADHD son, Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) and her neighbour – and would-be lover – Kyla (Suzanne Clément), it’s…
ccpopculture 