Teaching audiences to view films actively
By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3 cats
Director: Josh Reed
Starring: Damien Freeleagus | Krew Boylan | Lindsay Farris | Rebekah Foord | Wil Traval | Zoe Tuckwell-Smith
Jason says: “I suspect that the script for PRIMAL was, even more than most horror movies, dictated by resources – they could get this location for filming, a little bit of simple CGI, a reasonably straightforward make-up job for every
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Rating: 3.5 cats
Director: Zézé Gamboa
Starring: Adriana Rebello | Hermila Guedes | Joäo Lagarto | Lázaro Ramos | Patricia Bull | Pedro Hossi
Bruce says: “As any good Canadian friend – not to mention those further away from American soil – will tell you, we Americans know little or nothing about world geography. Bet you didn’t know that both Angola and Mozambique were
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Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Ron Morales
Starring: Dido De La Paz | Ella Guevara | Leon Miguel | Marife Necesito | Menggie Cobarrubias | Patricia Gayod
Jason says: “The easiest way to describe GRACELAND- a twistier, less philosophical take on Akira Kurosawa HIGH AND LOW- maybe does it a disservice by making it sound like it is less than its potential. That’s not particularly true; it’s
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Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Jon Wright
Starring: Bronagh Gallagher | David Pearse | Lalor Roddy | Richard Coyle | Russell Tovey | Ruth Bradley
Jason says: “Even if the name of GRABBERS didn’t make one think of the monsters in TREMORS, the rest of the movie would, in the best possible way. It has the things that this sort of movie needs to succeed
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Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Mohammad Rasoulof
Starring: Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy | Leyla Zareh | Roya Taymourian | Shahab Hosseini
Michael says: “Saw my first film at the New Directors/New Films Festival in NYC this weekend, and it was powerful. Noora is a young woman living in Iran who is in some sort of trouble. She has been barred from
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Carlos Sorin
Starring: Alejandro Awada | Victoria Almeida
Bruce says: “Carlos Sorin returns to Patagonia, the setting of his wistful 2004 film BOMBÓN: EL PERRO. One might call GONE FISHING a double road story. The main character Mario (Alejandro Awada) is on the road to recovery and is
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Rating: 3.4
Director: Bobcat Goldthwait
Starring: Joel Murray | Mackenzie Brooke Smith | Melinda Page Hamilton | Rich McDonald | Tara Lynne Barr
Thom says: “Another TIFF entry that I had ridiculously high expectations for that crashed me back to Earth. I loved Goldthwait’s WORLD’S GREATEST DAD so much that I included it in my TOP 10 for 2009 so this was certain
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Rating: 3 cats
Director: Ya-che Yang
Starring: Chang Hsiao-chuan | Gwei Lun-mei | Rhydian Vaughan
Jason says: “By odd happenstance, GIRLFRIEND BOYFRIEND (GF*BF, by the title appearing on-screen) is the second Taiwanese film I’ve seen in as many weeks to start its characters in high school and follow them to the present, and it turns
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Rating: 4.6
Director: Ashley Sabin | David Redmon
Jason says: “When one sees a documentary with a title like GIRL MODEL on a festival schedule, it’s probably not a bad idea to schedule a little time between it and the next film to wash a bit of the
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Chris McCawley | Jim Morrison | Jim Munroe | Tate Young
Starring: Jason Wrubell | Jonah Hundert | Kelly Spilchak | Rachel MacMillan | Sean Lerner | Taylor Katz
Jason says: “The ‘ghosts’ of this movie’s title are not supernatural; ‘gwai lo’ in Cantonese is both the word for ghost and slang for white/foreign people, and since this movie posits a future where the Western economies have collapsed… Well,
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Victor Ginzburg
Starring: Andrey Fomin | Mikhail Efremov | Sergey Shnurov | Vladimir Epifantsev | Vladimir Menshov
Bruce says: “The USA started the ball rolling with HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING in 1967 (based on the Broadway show that debuted six years earlier) and Canada gave us THE APPRENTICESHIP OF DUDDY KRAVITZ in 1974.
Read the review...Gebo and the Shadow (Portugal/France; 95 min.) directed by: Manoel de Oliveira starring: Michael Lonsdale; Claudia Cardinale; Leonor Silveira; Jeanne Moreau; Ricardo Trêpa Bruce says: “This film was my biggest disappointment at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival. Just when
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Rating: 3.75 cats
Director: Jonathan Lisecki
Starring: Charlie Barnett | Christian Coulson | Dulé Hill | Jenn Harris | Jonathan Lisecki | Matthew Wilkas
Bruce says: “In Provincetown I described GAYBY as a gay Judd Apatow film, thinking that was a terse description. I did not mean my comment to be pejorative in any way but it did prevent at least one friend from
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Rating: 2.75
Director: Kaushik Mukherjee
Starring: Anubrata Basu | Joyraj Bhattacharya | Kamalika Banerjee | Rii | Shilajit Majumdar
Jason says: “GANDU is almost more interesting for what it is – an ‘anti-Bollywood’ movie – than as a movie with characters and story and all. Shot in stark black-and-white, and musically propelled by hard-edged Bengali rap, it focuses on
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Rating: 1.75
Director: Michael Hoffman
Starring: Alan Rickman | Cameron Diaz | Cloris Leachman | Colin Firth | Stanley Tucci | Tom Courtenay
Jason says: “It’s a horrible thing when a caper movie doesn’t come off. The great ones are casual and precise in a way that seems to come as much from alchemy as chemistry, and when that doesn’t happen, it seems
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Rating: 3.8 cats
Starring: Alex Maizus | Brandon Waltz | Charles Kwame Odei | Dylan Hartigan | Jordan Puzzo | Kevin Corrigan | Kevin McManus | Matthew McManus
Jason says: “You don’t really need that much of a hook for a coming-of-age film – they’re more or less going to cover the same territory, albeit in different ways – but it doesn’t hurt to have one. That way,
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Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Tim Cawley
Chris says: “Creativity is nebulous; what inspires and motivates us often varies maddeningly from one artist to another, making it near impossible to form a general hypothesis on how people create. And yet, certain motifs and a collective camaraderie emerges
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Rating: 3.25
Director: Brandon Trost | Jason Trost
Starring: Art Hu | Brandon Barrera | Caitlyn Folley | James DeBello | Jason Trost | Lee Valmassy | Nick Principe
Jason says: “THE FP is the sort of flick that is precisely built to appeal to a certain category of movie fans, who are often surprised when it doesn’t do much for others. I have no doubt that it will
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Aleksei Fedorchenko | Harmony Korine | Jan Kwiecinski
Starring: al Kilmer | Darya Ekamasova | Igor Sergeev | Justyna Wasilewska | Pawel Smagala | Pawel Tomaszewski | Rachel Korine | Tomasz Tyndyk
Jason says: “The makers of this anthology were given dozens of instructions that ranged from restrictive to twee, or so the legend goes, although ultimately they had a fair amount of leeway so long as they made a movie on
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Joshua Sanchez
Starring: Aja Naomi King | E.J. Bonilla | Emory Cohen | Kathryn Meisle | Wendell Pierce
Thom says: “This is an amazingly problematic, thoughtful, but off-putting film. It’s a 4-character study that starts out with a middle-age roly-poly African American salesman, Joe, having an assignation with a white 15-year-old-boy, June. Wendell Pierce, who anyone that loves
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