Tag Archives: Christopher Abbott

Winter-Spring 2025 Season at Carbon Arc Cinema

May 10, 2025 flawintheiris

This weekend is the Animation Festival of Halifax, in its 14th year. It's put on by the good people at Carbon Arc Cinema, where I'm a volunteer programmer and artistic director. Carbon Arc used to go on hiatus during the summer, which made the festival the natural conclusion to our busiest time, when the days… Read More

Wolf Man review — Werewolf movie missing fangs

January 19, 2025 flawintheiris

Directed by Leigh Whannell | Written by Whannell and Corbett Tuck | 103 min | ▲▲1/2 | Amazon Prime My expectations for a fresh approach to the lycanthropy myth were stoked by this new film from Australian genre auteur Whannell, especially after he nailed the update to The Invisible Man and its intimate partner violence… 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

Sanctuary review — A bonded pair

September 1, 2023 flawintheiris

Directed by Zachary Wigon | Written by Micah Bloomberg | 96 min |▲▲▲▲△ | Amazon Prime When Rebecca (Margaret Qualley) walks into a hotel room where Hal (Christopher Abbott) is staying, she's wearing a blonde wig so patently awful right away you'll wonder about her bona fides. Apparently she's there to interview him about insurance… Read More

The Forgiven review — Morality tale finds guilt and grief in the desert

July 30, 2022 flawintheiris

Directed by John Michael McDonagh | Written by McDonagh, from a novel by Lawrence Osborne | ▲▲▲△△ | VOD The Hennigers, Jo and David (Jessica Chastain and Ralph Fiennes), are a brittle and bickering couple who've arrived in Morocco looking to attend a high society party out in the desert. David's particularly unbearable, an alcoholic… Read More

Possessor Uncut review — Ruthless and brilliant horror sci-fi

October 2, 2020 flawintheiris

Written and Directed by Brandon Cronenberg | 103 min | Crave Plus Brandon Cronenberg's second feature is a bloody marvel of nightmare fuel. I enjoyed Cronenberg's first, AntiViral, but, like a lot of people, I'm sure, I drew a lazy parallel or two between his work and his well-known, body-horror-loving daddy, the legendary David. This… Read More

Now on Canadian Netflix — February 2019

February 6, 2019 flawintheiris

Velvet Buzzsaw A deliciously trashy art world satire/horror from Dan Gilroy, the filmmaker behind Nightcrawler and Roman J. Israel. , a picture with a lot more of the edge and unease of the former rather than the prestige aspirations of the latter. It tells the story of a shallow, ambitious, group of nasties; the delightfully named Morf Vandewalt (another… Read More

First Man review — The Upright Stuff

October 20, 2018 flawintheiris

Directed by Damien Chazelle | Written by Josh Singer, from a book by James R. Hansen | 141 min | Netflix What First Man does well it does masterfully: the nuts and bolts and rivets and metal groans of analogue space flight. First Man brings an impressive level of realism to this recreation, with the sound design… 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

It Comes At Night review — Fighting the vague plague

June 15, 2017 flawintheiris

Written and Directed by Trey Edward Shults | 91 min | Hoopla It's rare, but every once in awhile a movie comes along that frustrates not because it's poorly made or awkwardly realized, but because it's thematically so bleak the film leaves you feeling pummelled. It Comes At Night is one of those films. While… Read More