Movie review: "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story"

dir. by Gareth Edwards
Rogue One is a story about hope, like many stories in the Star Wars universe. In many ways, it's a darker chapter in the franchise, but at its core it still encourages hope, even at the most hopeless of times, and even when it requires the greatest of risks and sacrifices. At a time where hope is in short supply, such a film is undoubtedly appealing, but while Rogue One succeeds as a sturdy, entertaining blockbuster, it never becomes more than that, even in spite of the greater desperation found in its story. It's a minor side story dressed up as a big epic in its own right, and while it has the look, the characters - the heart and soul of so many of these movies - are sorely lacking.

Movie review: "Moana"

BEST NEW FEATURE
dir. by Ron Clements and Don Hall
Moana, the latest animated film from Walt Disney Animation Studios, is the film's first musical since 2013's Frozen, which gives it a very high bar to live up to. Frozen was a deserving phenomenon, containing some of Disney's absolute greatest songs and pairing them with visuals of immense beauty. While Moana never exceeds that film's audiovisual heights, it comes ever-so-close, and boasts a sharper narrative to boot, making for a truly enchanting experience.

TV review: "Luke Cage" season 1

Created by Cheo Hodari Coker
Another day, another Marvel Netflix series which gets sidetracked in its second half. Luke Cage takes its titular character from 2015's excellent Jessica Jones and relocates him in Harlem, wandering amidst gang warfare and questions about black history and the African-American legacy. Like all of Netflix's comic book offerings, it positions itself as a more thoughtful take on the universe, and for a while, it succeeds.

If only it actually maintained that.

Movie review: "The Edge of Seventeen" (2016)

BEST NEW FEATURE
dir. by Kelly Fremon Page
High school as a setting has been slowly declining in the world of cinema for years now, the teen demographic such films would normally target increasingly being taken over by YA fantasy adventures. The Edge of Seventeen, arriving in a surprising wide release after a warm reception at TIFF, might not have the rating to necessarily connect with that audience - its depictions of sex and alcohol earned it an R in the United States, although it's saddled with a much broader 14A here in Canada - but its universal depiction of an older teen struggling to find comfort in a world which seems to be set against her provides a fresh, authentic take on the high school genre.

TV review: "Daredevil" season 2

Showrunners: Douglas Petrie, Marco Ramirez
When Daredevil first premiered on Netflix in 2015, it was a darker, sleeker, and more daring tonic to the increasingly stagnant and bloated Marvel movies. With a compelling villain in Wilson Fisk and an intriguing Catholic morality, the show was more stylish and thoughtful than Marvel's usual fare. When Netflix's second Marvel series, Jessica Jones, turned out even better, it left a lot of promise for Daredevil's second season. And yet, without Fisk, the series had an uphill battle to climb to live up to its own reputation, and in spite of the fascinating introduction of The Punisher, this second season has failed quite dramatically to keep up the pace.

Spoilers for Daredevil season 2 follow.

Movie review: "Arrival" (2016)

BEST NEW FEATURE
dir. by Denis Veilleneuve
Based on Ted Chiang's short story Story of Your Life, Denis Villeneuve's Arrival follows up his 2015 hit Sicario with a different angle. Whereas Sicario was tense and brutal, Arrival is much more heady and idea-driven, but what the two films do have in common is their excellence - at a time when "hard" science fiction is becoming increasingly rare in multiplexes, a film of this quality is a real treat, and regardless of your taste in drama, there's likely to be something for everyone here. If any film is to herald the beginning of this year's awards season, this is about as great a start as could be hoped for.

Doctor Strange movie review

BEST NEW FEATURE
dir. by Scott Derrickson
(tl;dr? skip to the end for a few pros and cons)

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is eight years old now, and it's expanded significantly since its debut in 2008 in just about every imaginable way. Films like Avengers: Age of Ultron and Captain America: Civil War have become sprawling behemoths of a million subplots, the Sokovia Accords have heightened the franchise's thematic ambitions, and the MCU has even lept off the big screen into the realms of Netflix and broadcast television, with cable soon to come. By this point, these movies have developed a recognisable formula, but while Doctor Strange fits all the trappings, it also brings the solid humour, characters, and action which makes these films a hit, and taps into a fresh vein of the source material in the process.

Movie review: "The Birth of a Nation"

dir. Nate Parker
When Nate Parker's passion project gained awards and rapturous applause at the Sundance Film Festival, it thrust him into a spotlight which has not been entirely beneficial to the film itself. While an artist should be separable from their art, there is a reason why Parker's past actions are mentioned so often in reviews of the film, as he's taken the writer-director-star role, and the content of the film sometimes makes the rape charges hard to ignore. If The Birth of a Nation were a great film, it might have been able to rise above these issues, and while it's well-shot and acted, Parker's severe limitations as a first-time director are consistently apparent, and his conventional, hagiographic script struggles to truly dig deep into its subject matter. There are surface pleasures here, but whether they're enough to satisfy will likely vary wildly.

What I saw at the 2016 Calgary International Film Festival

This year, I made an effort to watch several films at the 2016 Calgary International Film Festival. While I don't have the time to attend even close to every major film, I have managed to catch a few significant screenings, with a particular focus on films which have amassed buzz over the course of the festival circuit. Without further ado, here are my capsule reviews of each.

Hell or High Water movie review

BEST NEW FEATURE
dir. by David Mackenzie
After starring on the early seasons of FX's Sons of Anarchy, Taylor Sheridan made a name for himself as a screenwriter with his excellent script to last year's Sicario. With his directorial debut set to premiere at Cannes next year, he's one of the most promising talents in the industry right now, and this second film, directed by Starred Up director David Mackenzie, only confirms that. Hell or High Water is a riveting rural crime film with deep characters and a surprising sense of humour, and while it lacks some of the novelty which made Sicario so successful, it's slightly more engaging as a whole, and in a summer as dry as this one, a thriller which is both smart and entertaining is all the more of a breath of fresh air.

Kubo and the Two Strings film review

BEST NEW FEATURE
dir. by Travis Knight
Laika's work in stop motion has always been fairly prestigious. Films like Coraline and ParaNorman received no shortage of critical acclaim, their unconventional form of craft often being placed among such great studios as Ghibli and Pixar. In films like the aforementioned, the studio's craft often complemented the films' disturbing visuals, creating films which, while not strictly horror, were able to construct a fairly unsettling tone in the former and an effective genre homage in the latter. Kubo is in some ways a departure, taking the form of a sweeping epic journey more akin to a fantasy film than their earlier works, but this change in tone is revelatory, because Kubo and the Two Strings is the surest realization of their craft to date and stands a good chance of going down as their masterpiece.

Star Trek Beyond movie review

dir. by Justin Lin
The latest entry in the popular-but-divisive Star Trek reboot film series has been praised as a return to form after 2013's controversial Star Trek Into Darkness, and in many ways it's the closest these films have come to the tone and format of the original TV show. However, despite its many charming character moments and thoughtful tangents, Star Trek Beyond continues down the action-oriented route that this reboot series has become notorious for, and for all its moments-and there are plenty-its by-the-numbers plot and poorly-shot action never make this latest entry exciting enough to justify the wasted potential of its deeper elements.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople movie review

BEST NEW FEATURE
dir. by Taika Waititi
Fresh off of his acclaimed 2015 feature What We Do in the Shadows, New Zealand director Taika Waititi premiered his latest film, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, at this year's Sundance Film Festival. Boasting a well-deserved 8.4 on IMDb, this latest film is equal parts hilarious, adventurous, and deceptively deep, its delightful characters and fantastic script building up to one of the best films of the year.

Ghostbusters (2016) movie review

dir. by Paul Feig
BEST NEW FEATURE
Paul Feig's reboot of Ghostbusters was destined to be controversial from its very inception, not only because of Feig's already divisive style but also because of the expectations brought about by such a popular brand name, not to mention a smorgasbord of other factors, the worst of which being Sony's subpar trailers for the film. Thankfully, although it's not without its flaws, this new Ghostbusters, subtitled in some media as Answer the Call, is highly entertaining on its own merits, even if it doesn't quite meet the bar set by the franchise's legacy.

Love & Friendship movie review

dir. by Whit Stillman

BEST NEW FEATURE
Jane Austen's popular bibliography has long been a staple of cinema, with Pride & Prejudice in particular receiving no fewer than 10 screen adaptations. As such, it seems inevitable that filmmakers would eventually reach to the darkest corners of her catalogue, pulling out the early novella Lady Susan, a minor Austen work by all accounts, and expanding it to a full hour-and-a-half feature film. This adaptation, Whit Stillman's Love & Friendship, has received universal critical acclaim, boasting an impressive 99% on Rotten Tomatoes, making it the best-reviewed film of the summer so far excluding a handful of smaller releases. It's a testament to how weak this summer has been that Love & Friendship doesn't even come close to earlier title holders such as Boyhood and Mad Max: Fury Road, but at the same time, Stillman's film is an absolute delight from start to finish.

Finding Dory movie review

dir. by Andrew Stanton

After a long period of declining critical reception, Pixar made a massive comeback last year with the excellent Inside Out. Their latest effort, Finding Dory, is one of a few planned sequels to their most popular films. The film is too fun and charming to break their recent winning streak, but it's far from one of the studio's most inspired efforts, and especially after Inside Out, it seems especially lightweight and formulaic, delightful in the moment but not likely to be remembered in a week's time.

The Nice Guys movie review

dir. by Shane Black
Shane Black's third directorial effort, following cult hit Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and blockbuster Iron Man 3, and his first not starring Robert Downey Jr., built up a wave of anticipation off the backs of a few very promising trailers. The duo of Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling, alongside an irreverent tone, immediately sold The Nice Guys as a delightful action-comedy for the summer season. While the film certainly has its fair share of humour and charm, and while it gets more entertaining as it goes on, its jokes are disappointingly uneven, and a frustratingly high number of elements in the film aren't fully realised, up to and including its lead characters.

Captain America: Civil War movie revew

BEST NEW FEATURE
dir. by Joe and Anthony Russo
In 2015's Avengers: Age of Ultron, the sheer scale of property damage was upped to unprecedented levels for the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). At the time, it seemed like a shift away from the relative damage control that the original Avengers was retroactively praised for upon the release of 2013's Man of Steel, and worse, a dip into generic, pandering action movie tropes. Captain America: Civil War, the beginning of the third "phase" of the MCU, had not only the tough job of improving upon the widely-beloved Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but also the duty of restoring faith in this franchise after Age of Ultron proved so polarizing. While Civil War is unfortunately not as tight as The Winter Soldier, it provides a sprawling, introspective look at the Avengers and their place in the world that not only deepens the Marvel universe, but makes Age of Ultron better by extension, all while remaining gripping throughout.

Keanu movie review

dir. by Peter Atencio
In the wake of the cancellation of Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key's brilliant sketch-comedy series Key & Peele, the comedy duo became primarily attached to their big-screen project Keanu, an action-comedy selling itself primarily on a very adorable cat which was at the centre of its thin but oddball premise. Considering the duo's talents, their initial feature film held a lot of promise, and the cat-based advertisements were a success. However, the 90-minute length of Keanu is a much larger endeavour than Key & Peele's five-minute maximum sketches, and as it turns out, the greater running time only results in the duo's latest comedic idea long outstaying its welcome.

Everybody Wants Some!! movie review

dir. by Richard Linklater
BEST NEW FEATURE
In 1993, director Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused was released, a coming-of-age film which would later become one of the director's few entries in the Criterion Collection. Following the success of his 2014 opus Boyhood, he began work on a "spiritual sequel," which finally materialized as Everybody Wants Some!!, a film which features an entirely different cast but has been widely praised for capturing the same spirit. I haven't seen Dazed and Confused, but even with my relative lack of experience with Linklater's more modest films, Everybody Wants Some!! is nothing short of delightful.

Zootopia movie review

dir. by Bryon Howard and Rich Moore
BEST NEW FEATURE
Due to the delay of Pixar's The Good Dinosaur, the latest Walt Disney Animation Studios picture was delayed to 2016. Much like Wreck-It Ralph and Big Hero 6, Zootopia set itself apart with a unique premise, and attracted much anticipation as all Disney animated films do. Thankfully, while it's arguably still not up to Pixar's impeccably high standard, Zootopia is quite possibly the best Walt Disney Animation Studios picture in recent memory.

The Witch movie review

dir. by Robert Eggers

BEST NEW FEATURE

It's rare that an independent film receives a wide release, and almost unheard of that an indie horror flick will be sent to multiplexes across the continent. And yet, The Witch, one of the biggest festival darlings of 2015, has been presented to mainstream audiences, courtesy of independent house A24 in their first wide release to date. Films like this have historically not gone over well with mainstream moviegoers, and The Witch has been no exception, notoriously becoming subject to ridicule from disrespectful audiences. In spite of this, it's been a critical darling, again igniting the fire between film critics and your average joe.

So of course it's absolutely phenomenal. 

Deadpool movie review

dir. by Tim Miller
In 2009, the enduringly popular Marvel anti-hero Deadpool, real name Wade Wilson, made his first appearance on the big screen in the critically lambasted X-Men Origins: Wolverine. This appearance, which largely ignored his defining characteristics in the comics, proved wildly unpopular, and fans have been clamouring for a better representation of the character ever since. Now, in 2015, we have Deadpool, which isn't quite the movie this character deserves, but should please fans enough until that movie does come.

Hail, Caesar! movie review

dir. by Joel & Ethan Coen
Fresh off of writing Spielberg's award-nominated Bridge of Spies, the Coen Brothers return with an ode to a long-past age of Hollywood that, while wildly entertaining, fails to build into a cohesive whole, and feels both narratively and thematically scattershot as a result.

My 20 Favourite Films of 2015

Over the course of the past year, I have seen 53 feature films. This is the largest ending number I've had since I started this blog, and in that time, I've seen many films which I truly enjoyed. I haven't seen everything, but 53 is no insignificant number, and in that number I was able to see many that I greatly enjoyed. To conclude the year, here are 20 of its the films that I enjoyed the most.

The worst film I saw this year is The Cobbler, for the record.