Category Archives: Comedy

#AIFF2017 Day 6: Loving Vincent, How To Talk To Girls At Parties

September 20, 2017 flawintheiris

Loving Vincent An animated film that boasts (in its opening crawl) 100 artists hand-painted the thing. I'm not sure what the point is knowing that up front unless to direct viewers to the visuals rather than the somewhat less impressive script. Loving Vincent uses a mix of actors on sets, rotoscopic animation, and CGI to create…Read More

#AIFF2017 Day 5: Lucky, Small Town Crime, and God’s Own Country

September 19, 2017 flawintheiris

Lucky The death of Harry Dean Stanton barely 72 hours ago made Monday afternoon's screening of his final starring role that much more poignant, and even more so because the film is an old man's rumination on life and his own mortality. It reminded me a little of Paterson, without the poetry or twin iconography,…Read More

#AIFF2017 Day 3: The Square, Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool, Sweet Virginia

September 17, 2017 flawintheiris

I tend to be impressed by film doing a single thing well and managing to do that one good thing through its running time. Ruben Östlund's Palme d'or-winning The Square manages to be good at doing many things simultaneously, to the point where it's hard to collect all those things in your head at once. I…Read More

#AIFF2017 Preview + CTV + The Coast!

September 14, 2017 flawintheiris

September is here, and so is the AFF, or FIN, or AIFF. Whatever you call it, the local film festival is a bonanza for the Haligonian film lover, a chance to see local, Canadian, and international features and shorts, many of which won't ever find their way to a big screen near you. Last weekend…Read More

The Trip To Spain review — More culinary travels with caustic pals

September 4, 2017 flawintheiris

Directed by Michael Winterbottom | 108 min Interesting that the writing credits for these films—a UK TV series reedited for cinema release elsewhere—are a little vague. I think it speaks to how improvised they all are, and to the gifts of the two leads—Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon—playing exaggerated, ingrate versions of themselves. All of…Read More

Logan Lucky review — Chill heist comedy from Oceans 11 filmmaker

August 28, 2017 flawintheiris

Directed by Steven Soderbergh | Written by Rebecca Blunt | 118 min Steven Soderbergh has always been half in love with the form of film, the craft of it, and half in love with genres. In that he shares these preoccupations with the Coen Brothers—with the parallels between their styles maybe most obvious in this…Read More

Ingrid Goes West review — Social media satire delivers laughs, cold sweats

August 26, 2017 flawintheiris

Directed by Matt Spicer | Written by Spicer and David Branson Smith | 97 min With this and The Little Hours, Aubrey Plaza has ascended to queen of the summer's American indies—producing and starring in both of these weird, wonderful pictures. We meet her Ingrid crashing the wedding of a supposed former BFF before pepper-spraying…Read More

Landline review — Lots of laughs despite familiar tropes

August 11, 2017 flawintheiris

Directed by Gillian Robespierre | Written by Robespierre, Elisabeth Holm, and Tom Bean | 97 min An unexpected and charming dramedy about a family dealing with intergenerational angst, sex and infidelity. It's set in an interesting liminal age, the mid-'90s, that pre-millennial period before cell phones, just as home computers were beginning to change our…Read More

The Little Hours review — Terrific sex comedy with nuns

July 26, 2017 flawintheiris

Written and directed by Jeff Baena | 90 min It's 14th Century Italy, and the nuns are restless. Massetto (Dave Franco) is about to find out how restless. He's a handsome servant in the house of Lord Bruno (Nick Offerman), sleeping with Bruno's unsatisfied wife, Francesca (Lauren Weedman). When Bruno twigs on the infidelity, Massetto has…Read More

New On Canadian Netflix: June/July 2017

July 24, 2017 flawintheiris

Here are a cross-section of a number of mildly-to- solidly recommended films recently made available on Canadian Netflix. (You can click on the movie titles to read my original reviews where I’ve written them in the past.) *One note: In May I recommended Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, a film when I first saw it back…Read More