It is an utter impossibility to see all of the hundreds of films presented in the eleven days (one less than usual) of this year’s Montreal World Film Festival. So one must approach the daunting schedule, which offers as many as 13 different films at a given moment, with a plan. The most obvious tactic, as well as the most consistently rewarding, is to see as many of the films in the official competition as possible.
The early scenes of The Country Club look like the filmmakers might be aiming at a version of Caddyshack as made by Wes Anderson. That’s not at all a bad idea. Unfortunately it’s not where this random comedy goes.
Looking back on the career of Burt Reynolds, who for five consecutive years (1978 – 1982) was the world’s number one box office attraction, it’s hard not to remember Peter O’Toole’s famous line from My Favorite Year: “I’m not an actor, I’m a movie star!”
A dusting of dry Canadian humor adds a little sparkle to Mind Leech, a short creature feature filmed outside of Toronto.
Industrial waste dumped in a rural lake leads (as anyone who has ever seen a 1950s horror movie could predict) to a monstrous mutation, in this case a meter-long leech. Pulled from its watery abode by an ice fisherman, the creature attaches itself to his head and sends him into a murderous frenzy. Will the local cops be able to stop it? And if they do, will anyone believe them?
About 20 minutes into The Take Out Move, I started fantasizing about an appearance from The Colonel, the Monty Python character played by Graham Chapman who would burst into the middle of sketches and demand that they be stopped because they were getting “far too silly.”
It’s not that I wasn’t warned. What else would you expect from a movie that opens with the onscreen announcement “Based on the real facts of a fictional true story”?
At its best, the Canadian drama 8:37: Rebirth is a showcase for a quintet of talented actors. At the center of the story are two men linked by an event from 22 years ago, when both were teenagers. Jared (Glen Gould) has been in prison for all that time. We meet him at a difficult moment in his life, as he is released and expected to start a new life for himself in a world he knows little about. The only thing that seems clear to him is a desire to create images, progressing from drawings he made in prison to canvasses at a local adult art class.
If there is a through line to the career of director Martha Coolidge (Rambling Rose, Real Genius, Valley Girl), it is her consistent ability to make films that are better than they had any right to be given scripts that were not of the top tier. One of numerous independent directors of the 1980s who moved to television and cable in the 1990s when the tide turned away from low-key comedy-dramas, Coolidge is back with I’ll Find You, her first feature in over a decade.
Inflation be damned: you won’t find a better bargain for your moviegoing dollar than a Bison Pass to the Buffalo International Film Festival, whose 16th edition launches on Thursday. For $50, less than the price of four tickets at most theaters, you can see every movie that BIFF will be screening over five days. (Don’t forget that Monday is a national holiday.) For an extra $10, you can add all of the online screenings (available through October 20). If you’re a homebody, you can purchase the online only pass for $40. Not into planning?
An unusual event that brings out the foibles of the members of a small community has been an irresistable comic premise for movies from Whisky Galore up through Local Hero and Doc Hollywood. Writer-director Daniel Keith shows that it’s far from exhausted with Love in Kilnerry, an independently made and distributed comedy that has been building audiences through word of mouth.
The Valet retains so little of the 2007 French comedy of which it is a remake that you wonder why they just didn’t change the title while they were at it.
In the upstate New York town of Suffern, a young woman named River (Joelle Montoya) spends her days wondering what direction her life will take. Her time is spent with friends and acquaintances who are equally unmoored, including a financially desperate co-worker (Laura Desmond), a petulant bartender (Rivera Reese), a petty thief (Nick Carlascio), and an old woman (Ellen Boscov) whose once good life has passed her by.
The debut feature of writer-director Seth McTigue is a vividly photographed, intensely scored and sincerely acted caper drama with one problem: it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
The story revolves around two pairs of brothers on opposite sides of the law. The brothers Chang, Robert (Sami Li) and William (Roy Huang) are the heirs of the recently deceased head of a global import business. Always the favorite, the younger Robert was named CEO, to the chagrin of his elder sibling.
Every community should be so lucky as to have a restaurant like Belle Vie. Community building, in fact, was the stated goal of third-generation restauranteur Vincent Samarco when he moved to Los Angeles from France. With minimal resources, he rented a run-down building on a generic commercial block of Wilshire Boulevard in West Los Angeles, between a MacDonalds and a KFC. He built and decorated as much of the interior as he could, including making his own tables, and opened his Parisian-style bistro in 2016.
Recalling classic home-based thrillers like Wait Until Dark and Shallow Grave, By Night’s End is the kind of low-budget indie that tends to get lost in the crush of movies looking for an audience in the post-theatrical landscape.
Theater people are almost proudly superstitious, and about no play more so than Macbeth. That’s what makes a summer stock production of “the Scottish play” (for those who dare not say its name) the perfect vehicle for this satire of show folk.
The Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz once noted that “War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.” This statement, popularly abbreviated to the term “the fog of war,” is illustrated by the low budget war drama The Final Sacrifice, which upends simplistic notions of “good guys” and “bad guys.”
In this hour-long documentary, American filmmakers Eladio Arvelo and Shareef Haq visit Vietnam to explore how that once tortured country was able to turn itself around within one generation to become one of the fastest-growing economies in the world.
A title that sounds like a new book by Robert Reich attached to a film that consists entirely of two people in a hotel room makes for an intriguing combination. That writer-director Adam Mervis leaves it to viewers to make the connection(s) is fair warning that The Last Days of Capitalism is more intellectually challenging that, say, 21 Bridges, the 2019 action hit that Mervis also wrote. But even those uninclined to work out all of the script’s hidden meanings will find reasons to enjoy this trim indie drama.
There are reasons why the horror anthology—a feature compiled from a handful of short films—is an economical and efficient choice for independent filmmakers. It can be made piecemeal with little need for continuity among the segments. And as long as the segments have a clever premise, audiences will overlook a lot of technical deficiencies for the short period of time it takes for the story to unspool.
In a death row cell in a California prison sits Jane Arcs (Eli Jane). After thirteen years here the day has arrived for her to be put to death by lethal injection. She calmly recalls the events that brought her to this point. Her peaceful acceptance is in marked contrast to her earlier life as an underground street fighter nicknamed “Kill Shot.”