By Matthew Moorcroft Strong Recommendation Don’t let it’s poor marketing and Mad Libs style premise fool you – The Sheep Detectives is the kind of family film that one wishes we still got on a regular basis. Mixing the modern whodunnit stylings of Knives Out with the tone and whismy of Babe, and also a…
By Matthew Moorcroft Highest Recommendation Feeling like something of a minor miracle in theaters, Obsession is yet another of the many horror films of the past several years brought to us by online talent turned professional filmmaker. It’s becoming increasingly clear at this point that, with the advent of the digital space, the next big…
By Matthew Moorcroft Weak Recommendation Once again, I am probably being far too kind to this. I don’t think anybody is under the assumption that Mortal Kombat II is going to be some level of high art. It is, after all, a movie where two of it’s major players is a woman whose weapon of…
By Matthew Moorcroft Strong Recommendation As early as five minutes in, Hokum is already going for the jugular. To some, jump scares are an easy tactic, but to somebody like Damian McCarthy it’s clear that it can also be an artform in itself; a sudden release of tension and fright that comes at just the…
By Matthew Moorcroft Strong Recommendation Playing into the metaphysical and poetic, Mother Mary is exactly the kind of film that you would expect David Lowery to make. At his core, Lowery is a filmmaker that plays into emotion and vibes first and foremost, with all of his films carrying a level of painterly like ambiguity…
By Matthew Moorcroft Solid Recommendation Almost as nasty as an actual decaying corpse, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, which is indeed the full title, revels in it’s gruesome horror. Less overtly scary and more focused on being as disgusting and gross as you can imagine, it follows in the footsteps of the titular director’s past work…
By Matthew Moorcroft Strong Recommendation Ever hear somebody say something so shocking and unexpected you can just hear a pin drop and literally feel the air being sucked out of the room? That’s the entire impetus of The Drama, which finds the marriage between Emma and Charlie threatened just days before it’s supposed to happen.…
By Matthew Moorcroft Unsure Seemingly designed from the ground up to be as frenetic and as fast moving as possible to keep the attention of even the smallest of hyperactive children (or hyperactive, chronically online adults), The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is only barely just that. A barrage of loud noise, colors, and action sequences,…
By Matthew Moorcroft Highest Recommendation The Earth is dying. Something is dimming the sun, and we only have 30 years to really prevent it or things are going to get bad really fast. Project Hail Mary, as a film, isn’t about climate change but it certainly feels like it in some ways; a film about…
By Matthew Moorcroft Unsure Bursting onto the frame with a loud, overwhelming jolt to the senses not unsimiliar to the very lightning bolt that brought Frankenstein’s monster to life years and years ago, The Bride! is almost as unwieldy and impossible to quantify as said monster as well. It’s the stitched together, falling apart at…
By Matthew Moorcroft Weak Recommendation One of the canon rules of horror is that usually what you don’t see is scarier then what you do see. Undertone, with it’s focus on auditory horror and a sole lead actor on screen for the entire runtime, feels like the ultimate test of that canon rule. With almost…
By Matthew Moorcroft Highest Recommendation It doesn’t take long to realize that Hoppers is the real deal from Pixar. Probably the studio that has struggled the most post-pandemic, small success stories like Elemental and big blockbuster hits like Inside Out 2 have managed to keep them in the conversation as their major projects, regardless of…
By Matthew Moorcroft Strong Recommendation Maybe one of the few working directors who can actually earn the “from the twisted mind” phrase in his marketing, Gore Verbinski returns after a 9 year hiatus after audience soundly rejected the wildly underrated – and exceptionally bizarre – A Cure for Wellness and sent Verbinski into director’s jail.…
By Matthew Moorcroft Strong Recommendation Made on a small budget of $3 million or less, Iron Lung is something of a minor miracle in the fact that it’s even good in the first place. Mark Fischbach – better known as Markiplier both online and to his fans – isn’t necessarily a newcomer to horror or…
By Matthew Moorcroft Strong Recommendation It’s been a long time since a full blown, true Sam Raimi flick hasn’t there? Sure, he’s made a couple of blockbusters like the scattershot if entertaining Oz the Great and Powerful and the wildly misunderstood Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but when it comes to the horror…
By Matthew Moorcroft Solid Recommendation As animated films go, Arco is as animated as they come. Quite literally, in fact, as the rainbow colors that adorn it’s title character leap off the screen and feel simply just made for the animated medium. You simply just can’t tell a story like this in live action, and…
By Matthew Moorcroft Highest Recommendation In some ways a return to form for acclaimed indie filmmaker Chloe Zhao in terms of subject matter, Hamnet is positioned on the surface as a much deserved victory lap film after her Best Picture winning Nomadland swept audiences away and her divisive MCU flick Eternals confused those same audiences…
By Matthew Moorcroft Highest Recommendation Arguably the first movie to have Toronto be a main character in it’s own right, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie begins with a stunt so ludicrous and insane that you would think that they would save it for later on in the film as the big show stopper…
By Matthew Moorcroft Solid Recommendation The second film adaptation of the Japanese novel, All You Need is Kill is in a strange scenario that doesn’t happen often in the medium – specifically that of the American version being the first one out of the gate. Having previously been adapted as the great Tom Cruise vehicle…
By Matthew Moorcroft Solid Recommendation Primate is one of those movies that tells you everything you need to know about it basically right away before you even see it. A pet chimpanzee, named Ben, has gone rabid (quite literally, actually) and his loving family is now the target of his aggression. And if you know…
By Matthew Moorcroft Highest Recommendation Marty Mauser has a dream. He wants to not just a champion, but THE champion; a name to be remembered by history and the rest of the world. A tall order, and it’s for table tennis no less, a sport that at this point in history was only starting to…
By Matthew Moorcroft Highest Recommendation One of the best things about modern day cinema is that every couple of years, without fail, there is a new Benoit Blanc mystery available to us. The latest, Wake Up Dead Man, is probably the biggest swerve of them yet, removing itself from the class critiques of the prior…
By Matthew Moorcroft Highest Recommendation The Sully family is grieving. This also means, due to the nature of Pandora and it’s interconnected ecosystem, the entirety of Pandora is grieving in unison, and that’s the moment we start off with in Avatar: Fire and Ash. James Cameron has always been as ambitious and intense of a…
By Matthew Moorcroft Weak Recommendation The biggest challenge of adapting Wicked was always going to that pesky second act, wasn’t it? I’m not really sure how to review or look at Wicked: For Good (which should really be called Wicked: Part II frankly but that’s neither here nor there), which is a film that ultimately…
By Matthew Moorcroft Weak Recommendation Taking another stab at adapting one of Stephen King’s most provocative novels, The Running Man takes it’s title almost entirely literally as it hits the ground at top speed and never really slows down for a minute. It makes sense then that Edgar Wright – a director known for his…
By Matthew Moorcroft Highest Recommendation The master of uncomfortable cinema returning for another round, Yorgos Lanthimos’ gleefully dark and cynical Bugonia opens with a long discussion about the nature of the honeybee worker. Jesse Plemons’ Teddy, who is the focus of the picture, describes honeybees and their service to their queen and how they function…
By Matthew Moorcroft Highest Recommendation The bleakly funny and overtly stressful – almost painfully so – If I Had Legs I’d Kick You starts with a flooding, both metaphorically and literally. Literally in that Linda, the at her wit’s end mother and therapist trying to balance having a sick kid, an out of touch husband,…
By Matthew Moorcroft Highest Recommendation I have spent a lot of time mulling over The Secret Agent. Out of all the films I saw at WIFF this year, it’s the one that has most intrigued me from both a technical and analytical perspective. It’s not my first rodeo with Brazilian cinema – far from it…
By Matthew Moorcroft Strong Recommendation Kiyoshi Kurosawa really doesn’t like the internet. As far back as the late 90s Kuorsawa has tapped into his own personal fears about what it’s like to live away from people, attached to too much technology and not enough attachment to the people around us. And while he hasn’t really…
By Matthew Moorcroft Highest Recommendation Families are complicated. The latest from Joachim Trier, fresh off of international acclaim with the absolutely sublime The Worst Person in the World, directly confronts those complicated families with the level of panache and attunement that we see from him on a regular basis. And what is more complicated then…
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