Thirty years ago, Canada’s first LGBTQ film festival held its inaugural screening. Today, the image+nation festival continues to share queer cinema with Montreal’s wider community, supporting the producers and artists who create these spellbinding stories. Bringing all of this together is no easy task. Programming director Katharine Setzer and her[Read More…]
Tag: film
Cielo: Alison McAlpine’s conversation with the sky
Among the 142 films featured at the latest Montréal International Documentary Festival (Nov. 9 – 19), one of the most memorable was Cielo, the first feature film by Canadian director Alison McAlpine. Set in the Chilean Atacama Desert, Cielo is an exploration of the night sky’s hold over the people who[Read More…]
The Killing of a Sacred Deer brings original formal approach to derivative subject matter
The Killing of a Sacred Deer opens with Schubert’s grandiose “Stabat Mater” playing over an extreme close-up of a human heart mid-operation, followed by a conversation between two surgeons about wristwatch straps. Within minutes, director Yorgos Lanthimos sets the tone for the film: Darkly eccentric, fearlessly macabre, and meticulously choreographed. However,[Read More…]
Made in Canada doesn’t mean Canadians will watch
On Sept. 28, the federal government announced a partnership with Netflix. The online streaming service agreed to invest $500 million over the next 10 years to create “Canadian content” as part of Justin Trudeau’s cultural strategy, which will in turn pledge $125 million towards promoting Canadian content. Netflix will be[Read More…]
The Tribune team takes on Montreal’s Festival du Nouveau Cinéma
This past October marked the 46th iteration of Montreal’s annual Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (FNC). Decades into its existence, the festival is continuing to grow; this year, FNC managed to secure the premiere of big name films, most notably Blade Runner 2049. The McGill Tribune looks at what succeeded, and[Read More…]
‘Blade Runner 2049’ sets a new standard for Hollywood sequels
For decades, it seemed like a Blade Runner (1982) sequel was doomed to be an artistic failure. Arguably Ridley Scott’s magnum opus, the cyberpunk cult classic lives on in major part because of its absolute disinterest in offering clear answers to the questions it raises. The prospect of a follow-up threatened[Read More…]
Pop Rhetoric: Selling horror
Three weekends into its theatre run, Andrés Muschietti’s It continued to lead the box-office with an impressive $29.8 million three-day total. Simultaneously, Darren Aronofsky’s mother! kept collecting dust with a meek $3.3 million in its second weekend despite strong TIFF word-of-mouth and Jennifer Lawrence’s star power. Both films are critically-acclaimed,[Read More…]
“Dunkirk” is director Christopher Nolan’s most immersive work to date
Since his first film Following (1998), Christopher Nolan has proven himself to be one of the most ambitious directors of his generation. Many of Nolan’s films deal with complicated time structuring, turning his scripts into labyrinthine puzzles to be decoded, such as the amnesic haze of Memento (2000), Inception’s (2010) layered dreamscapes,[Read More…]
“It: Chapter One” tugs at the heartstrings but fails to terrify
It had been in “development hell” since 2009, cycling through a plethora of directors, writers, and stars. Based on the novel by Stephen King, and originally adapted into a 1990 miniseries, the feature film incarnation was finally released as the sophomore effort of director Andy Muschietti on Sept. 8. It[Read More…]
Beauty, trauma, and remembrance in new documentary ‘Cameraperson’
Watching Cameraperson, the latest film by Academy Award-winning documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson, feels more like a slow walk through an art exhibit than a film. Cameraperson consists only of clips from past documentaries labeled by the location in which they were shot—the film thus remains opaque to the viewer for most[Read More…]
