Ghostbusters (2016)
Everyone’s got an opinion on the new Ghostbusters whether or not they’ve seen it. Does it suck? Does it rock? …Short answer: yes. To both.
It’s Only the End of the World (2016)
Xavier Dolan’s sixth feature film, It’s Only the End of the World, had its Australian premiere at Sydney Film Festival from a precarious position. Arriving from Cannes with a pair of strange, if increasingly common bedfellows – widespread critical derision and the Grand Prix prize – it’s perched on a pedestal that demands either full-throated…
Critical Dissent: Debating Mommy with Kyle Turner
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…
Mommy (2014)
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…
Double Feature: I Killed My Mother (2009) and Heartbeats (2010)
Xavier Dolan’s first two features seem like they needed to be made by a young director. I Killed My Mother and Heartbeats each feature Dolan as lead actor; the former examining his character’s tense relationship with his mother, the latter instead positioning him at the vertex of a similarly tense love triangle. I doubt an…
