Category Archives: Drama

Halifax Independent Filmmakers’ Festival (HIFF) 2019 launches

June 12, 2019 flawintheiris

For fans of the art of film, and those fans of Carbon Arc Cinema who drop by this blog interested in the more independent films I'm seeing, you might want to check out what's happening over here. It's HIFF, a festival of creative film—narrative, experimental, documentary, features, and shorts. So, in other words, something for…Read More

Reviews: Vox Lux, On The Basis Of Sex, Bumblebee, Destination Wedding, The Mummy, Under The Silver Lake

May 1, 2019 flawintheiris

Vox Lux Brady Corbet's film is a strange animal, a drama about a pop star that's also a treatise on fame and the responsibility of art to inspire both violence and healing. Not all of its ideas work, but it deserves kudos for what it tries to do more than what it succeeds at. The…Read More

Carbon Arc Reviews — Winter 2019 Season

April 30, 2019 flawintheiris

Carbon Arc Independent Cinema's most recent season has concluded. As a programmer I am grateful to have been able contribute to the screening selection, though as a volunteer I wasn't able to see every film that showed. The ones I missed, disappointingly, include Rafiki, Capernaum, Styx, Birds Of Passage, and Ziva Postec: The Editor Behind The Film Shoah.…Read More

Now on Canadian Netflix — March 2019

April 1, 2019 flawintheiris

Polar It took me a minute or two to get over the fact that Mads Mikkelsen had a feature in cinemas recently called Arctic, and there's this one on Netflix called Polar. I bet the producers of both films were annoyed. This is a John Wick-esque action picture from Swedish music video director Jonas Åkerlund,…Read More

Gloria (2013) and Gloria Bell reviews — Oscar-winning filmmaker revisits his past

March 25, 2019 flawintheiris

The Hummingbird Project review — Epic ambition drives unusual thriller

March 21, 2019 flawintheiris

Written and Directed by Kim Nguyen | 111 min | Crave Plus "You are here to have moments of pure inspiration, and right now, you're not even here." So says Eva (Salma Hayek with an amazing dye-job), to Anton (Alexander Sarsgaard), a brilliant, slightly slouched tech wizard, one of those guys operating so far above…Read More

An Audience of Chairs review — Mental illness drama earns its tears

March 21, 2019 flawintheiris

Directed by Deanne Foley | Written by Rosemary House from the Joan Clark novel | 93 min Deanne Foley’s new drama is an honest and sometimes frightening portrait of a woman’s struggle with mental illness, which first screened at FIN Atlantic Film Festival in September. Maura (Carolina Bartczak) is a concert pianist who spends the…Read More

Everybody Knows review — Family melodrama trumps suspense

March 12, 2019 flawintheiris

Written and Directed by Asghar Farhadi | 133 min | Netflix Two of Iranian auteur Farhadi's last three features won the Best Foreign Film Oscar, A Separation in 2011 and The Salesman in 2016. In between those two was The Past, also excellent. Farhadi is a humanist filmmaker, who roots his social realist tales in character and family. They…Read More

Reviews: Hotel Artemis, Wildlife, Searching

March 1, 2019 flawintheiris

Hotel Artemis Writer-Producer Drew Pearce delivers a fairly original b-movie/sci-fi/crime drama for his debut as a feature filmmaker. It's 2028, and Los Angeles is going up in flames due to a city-wide riot, but the Artemis is busy. It's a clinic for criminals, where the patients are named after their room allocations. I said original, but…Read More

Shoplifters review — Gentle Oscar-nominee is lovely, but lacks conflict

January 25, 2019 flawintheiris

Written and Directed by Hirokazu Koreeda | 121 min | Netflix and Hoopla Beloved Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Koreeda's drama won the Palme d'Or at Cannes last summer, and is now up for Best Foreign Language film, and it's not hard to see why. The story of an impoverished family living in the margins in Tokyo—an…Read More