A Complete Unknown review — It’s all new to me, like some mystery

December 25, 2024 flawintheiris

Directed by James Mangold | Written by Mangold and Jay Cocks, from the book Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald | 142 min | ▲▲▲▲△ | Crave I slouched into the screening room for A Complete Unknown with more than a few reservations about what I was about to see. I've gone on the record…Read More

Babygirl review — A fresh erotic classic

December 24, 2024 flawintheiris

Written and Directed by Halina Reijn | 114 min | ▲▲▲▲▲ | Amazon Prime A capsule review of this film appeared on FITI in September during #TIFF24 The marketing of this film has leaned heavily on it being an erotic thriller, the likes of which were popular among adult audiences in the 1980s and 1990s,…Read More

Juror #2 review — A perfectly cromulent courtroom drama

December 23, 2024 flawintheiris

Directed by Clint Eastwood | Written by Jonathan A. Abrams | 114 min | ▲▲▲△△ | Crave Juror #2 is a comfortingly old-school American courtroom drama, complete with a first act of lawyers, witnesses, and jurors, and a second act of deliberation. The thing that's wowing critics is these stories were told frequently in the…Read More

2024 at the Movies: Honourable Mentions of Terrific Pictures

December 22, 2024 flawintheiris

Seasons Greetings, FITI readers! Tis the time for lists — I've already seen a few, including ones by the sadly deranged folks who believe Megalopolis deserves some kind of special mention. But that's the great thing about this highly subjective game critics play, people see value in vastly different work. If you don't feel like…Read More

The Knox Office: Five of the Top 10

December 22, 2024 flawintheiris

On Friday I chatted with fill-in host Preston Mulligan on CBC Information Morning about some of my favourite films of the year — but not all of them. I just don't think I can be comprehensive until I've seen some of the big seasonal releases coming this week. But with my final column of 2024…Read More

Kraven The Hunter review — Dumb, but not dull

December 18, 2024 flawintheiris

Directed by J.C. Chandor | Written by Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway, Kraven The Hunter created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko | 127 min | ▲▲▲△△ | Crave The Sony/Marvel project to make movies around the villains of Spider-Man (but not featuring Spider-Man, except in their animated offerings) has been a bit…Read More

The End review — Not a bang, a musical whimper

December 15, 2024 flawintheiris

Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer | Written by Oppenheimer and Rasmus Heisterberg | 148 min | ▲▲△△△ Sometimes you can congratulate a filmmaker for their ambition, the ideas baked into the work or the way they tell a story, even if the end result is flawed. Documentarian Oppenheimer — who gave us the shockingly good non-fiction…Read More

Good One review — Found in the forest

December 12, 2024 flawintheiris

Written and Directed by India Donaldson | 89 min | ▲▲▲▲△ | VOD and Kanopy Donaldson's first feature could be considered smack in the middle of the genre somewhat derisively called "shoegaze." It's not terribly interested in plot. Instead, she tells a character-driven story of a teenaged girl, Sam (Lily Collias), her father, Chris (James…Read More

The Knox Office: This year’s holiday movies

December 8, 2024 flawintheiris

I crammed in a bunch of flicks last week, the new seasonal fare in cinemas and on streaming services. I caught up with two that have been in cinemas for a few weeks — Red One, which is a fatally flawed Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson vehicle but maybe not quite as abysmal as reviews have…Read More

Yearly Archives: 2024