Reviews

Man, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Where do you even start with this one? It's not just a movie, it's... an experience. A really messy, beautiful, gut-wrenching, and kind of trippy look at what it actually means to be in love—or maybe just what it means to be human. ​I remember the first time I saw it, I was totally thrown. The way it messes with the timeline, those crazy visual effects where people disappear and things collapse around Joel (Jim Carrey, in the best performance of his life, hands down) as his memories are literally being erased. It’s disorienting, and it makes you feel just as lost and desperate as he is, trying to cling to the good stuff while the bad stuff—and even the memory of the person you loved, Clementine (Kate Winslet, also incredible)—is just poof, gone. ​But here's the kicker, the part that makes it so unforgettable: it's not really about the sci-fi memory erasure device. It's about the fact that even when the love turns sour, and you're fighting and miserable, the pain is connected to the joy. You can't scrub out the bad without losing the good, because the whole relationship—the whole person—is a package deal. And what Charlie Kaufman's script, with Michel Gondry's visionary direction, argues is that even knowing you'll probably end up heartbroken again, you'd choose the memory, the experience, the person, anyway. ​It's a testament to the fact that messy, complicated love is better than a neat, 'spotless' mind. Seriously, if you've ever had a breakup that made you wish you could just hit a reset button, this film is going to hit you like a ton of bricks. It's funny, sad, inventive, and deeply, deeply honest about the human condition. It’s the kind of movie you think about for days, and then periodically for years. ​

Star Rating: \star\star\star\star\star (5 out of 5 stars. An absolute masterpiece.)

Fun to relax with a thriller after an exhausting 10-day Vancouver Int'l Film Festival. I liked the film a lot, especially the amazing setting and especially Hugh Grant in one of the best roles I've ever seen him perform.

Man, oh man. If you're looking for a Jane Austen adaptation that actually gets the human drama behind the high collars and fancy teacups, the 1995 version of "Sense and Sensibility" is just a flat-out gorgeous, moving experience.
This isn't just some dusty costume drama; it's a deeply felt, sometimes heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting story about two sisters navigating a world where women had almost zero power and their entire future hinged on a good marriage.
Emma Thompson (who also wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay—talk about a powerhouse) plays Elinor, the older sister who is the very embodiment of "Sense." She feels everything, but she's got this incredible inner strength and restraint. You just watch her silently suffer through her own disappointment, keeping up a brave face for everyone else, and you want to reach through the screen and give her a hug.
Then you have Kate Winslet as Marianne, the "Sensibility" half. She's all passion, poetry, and wearing her heart on her sleeve, which of course sets her up for a devastating fall when she meets the dashing but unreliable Willoughby (played with perfect, infuriating charm by Greg Wise). Winslet is phenomenal—you feel every ecstatic high and every crushing low of her youthful, reckless emotion.
And the men! Hugh Grant's Edward Ferrars is this beautifully awkward, genuinely good guy who's trapped by circumstance, and Alan Rickman as Colonel Brandon... well, he's the quiet, steadfast hero we all root for. Rickman brings such gentle, wounded dignity to the role. Honestly, the casting is so perfect, it's almost unreal.
Director Ang Lee (yes, the guy who did Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Life of Pi) has a surprisingly light but incredibly sensitive touch with this material. The film is visually stunning, making the English countryside look like another character, but he never lets the scenery overshadow the real emotional core. The stakes feel real, the tears feel earned, and the final moments of genuine happiness are so completely satisfying.
It’s an absolute masterclass in taking a classic novel and making it feel immediate and deeply, truly human. You walk away thinking about the difference between what is wise and what the heart wants, and how sometimes, you need a little of both to find your way. A true classic.
My Rating:
★★★★★ (5 out of 5 Stars) - A perfect, deeply moving adaptation.

What a sweet, compassionate film about young women, teen moms, in one of the most difficult periods of their lives. The film is so well directed and acted, it almost comes across like a documentary.
I really hope that many women in this situation (teen pregnancies) encounter so much help and compassion as the women in this film.
Excellent work by the Dardenne brothers, once again.
It was also fun to attend my final Vancouver Int'l Film Festival of 2025 screening in the new (to me) movie theatre at the Alliance Française in Vancouver. What a beautiful building!
—VIFF 2025, film No. 17--

One Battle After Another (2025) - A Review
If you're going into One Battle After Another expecting a clean, straightforward action flick, well, bless your heart. Paul Thomas Anderson has given us a dense, frantic, and surprisingly hilarious trip that feels like taking a sledgehammer to the modern political thriller genre. It's an experience, and one I’m still wrestling with.
The movie is a wild adaptation, or maybe more accurately, an anarchic riff on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland. It plunges you headfirst into the story of Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio, delivering a beautifully frazzled, post-explosives-expert performance), a former member of the revolutionary group "The French 75" who is just trying to live a quiet life with his daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), sixteen years after the group disbanded. You can practically smell the stale weed and existential dread on Bob.
Of course, the quiet life is shattered when the maniacally obsessive Colonel Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn, giving us a deliciously reptilian villain) resurfaces, forcing Bob back into the underground world he tried so hard to escape.
What follows is an absolute whirlwind of kinetic energy. The camera work is often unhinged, the action sequences—especially a certain surreal car chase—are heart-pounding and absurd in equal measure, and Jonny Greenwood’s score rattles your teeth. DiCaprio is fantastic as the exhausted, bumbling, yet still-loyal father, a far cry from his usual cool, suave roles. He’s clumsy, stressed, and a bit of a burn-out, which is exactly why it works.
But what makes this movie truly hit is its attitude. It’s one part intense, genuinely gripping thriller—especially when dealing with the very real, very current issues of immigration and the terrifying power of a secretive ruling class—and one part dark, sarcastic political commentary. It pokes fun at everybody: the "woke warriors" and the "conservative establishment." It's not afraid to be weird, throwing in heightened, almost cartoonish characters and plot points that somehow make the whole thing feel more authentic to the ridiculousness of our current world.
It’s messy, undeniably long, and sometimes confusing. Some characters feel a bit too much like caricatures, and the plot device of a kidnapped daughter can feel a little too simple for such a complex film.
Yet, despite its flaws, I loved it. It has a fierce, rebellious heart. It’s a tribute to underground resistance and a sharp indictment of power structures, all while being arguably the most entertaining film Anderson has made in a while. It’s the kind of movie you walk out of buzzing, ready to argue about every bizarre detail.
My Rating: ★★★★½ (4.5 out of 5 Stars)
Go see it, ideally on the biggest screen you can find. You’ll be talking about it for months.

Having lived in Cologne, Germany for 17 years, and worked all that time within a block of the Cologne opera and the WDR radio buildings, it was a lot of fun watching this period film.
It reminded me a little of "Lola rennt", as the protagonist is perpetually running!
Loved the music and the premise for the film, apparently based on a true story.
Very well executed, very clever format.
The younger actress does not look like a teenager at all, unless people just matured earlier in 1975?
But we should suspend our disbelief in cinema.
Loved this movie!
—VIFF 2025, film No. 16–

Wow! What a film. It's a movie like they don't make 'm anymore! The film had everything it needed: drama, action, romance, comic relief...
It was excellently scripted, directed, acted and the art direction and music (mostly classic and jazz) was fantastic.
A few forseeable plot points here and there but otherwise, a perfect film.
Daniel Roher (of the Oscar-winning documentary Navalny) is such an incredibly talented director!
—VIFF 2025, film No. 14–

“Not if. When.” These haunting words are the tagline for the new Kathryn Bigelow drama A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE. In this movie, U.S government officials pick up a ballistic missile on their radar. They don’t know where it was fired from. It appears to be aiming at them. What a sobering movie for the world today. This story is divided into three parts, but each part shows the same period of time, just through different perspectives. It feels like watching a jigsaw puzzle put itself together, super satisfying but also terrifying. Scarier than most horror films these days. The score is gripping, having the Academy award-winning composer of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT and CONCLAVE, Volker Bertelmann. This has an unbelievable ensemble cast, but I want to keep them a surprise. Considering the fact that so much of this movie is in confined spaces and on computer screens, it’s so impressive just how dramatic it gets. It’s also pretty refreshing watching competent people in high authority, important jobs. There are two different levels of tension going on here. The first is the tension that you see on screen happening before your eyes. The second is the tension I kept feeling at the back of my mind. I kept thinking “Everyone in this movie is good at their job. Omg if this happens in real life, we’re f***ed.” It feels smart, well-researched, and authentic. It has brief but great character development. You feel the precious minutes ticking away and you want to scream. Some people might be unsatisfied with the ending, but I found it perfectly fitting, after some thought. Overall, A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE is an urgent nuclear thriller that feels like a documentary. This pulse-pounder is coming out on Netflix on October 24, I highly recommend it! I’m off to go buy a bunker.

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There is no better word for this movie than FUN. Imagine The Big Short, but with better characters, delicious '70s flavour, and some really fricking good music. The movie stumbles a bit in trying to tell too many stories—some threads feel like they are picked up and dropped at random—but the characters and overarching story are so entertaining that I found I hardly noticed. A blast from start to finish, even if it did stretch credulity of what a teenager looks like

I was struggling between 8 and 9 stars, but the Wilhelm Scream pushed this over the edge for me. This is one of those movies that I thought could never live up to the hype, and yet it somehow surpassed it. Wagner Moura is rightfully having his praises sung for his performance, but the best part about O Agente Secreto is that you can feel the passion, for film and for Brazil, in every single frame

A really eye-opening doc with a deeply personal touch. Learning about the history of Afghanistan through the eyes of these women made a story that could hit that much harder, and the director's choice to include herself in the interviews themselves made for some interesting conversations. I also liked the way it played with sound, archival footage and texture.

Very rarely, a true story can be more fascinating than fiction. In the late 90’s, a man named Jeffery Manchester (Channing Tatum), a divorced father of three, robbed over forty restaurants by breaking in through the roofs (rooves?), earning himself the name ROOFMAN. This movie focuses on his life after he escapes prison, how he lived in a Toys R Us for 6 months, and how he meets Leigh (Kirsten Dunst), a divorced mother of two. Director Derek Cianfrance has found a fascinating true story to work with, and he does a great job with it. Tailored to Tatum’s likability and charm, this seems like a comedy, but it’s more like a dramedy. Jeff is a very polite person, according to the workers he stuck in freezers. The chemistry between the two leads is really great. This is my favorite performance from both Tatum and Dunst. Jeff is very observational, and the movie actually shows that in action. The side characters are fun, including Uzo Aduba, Ben Mendelsohn, Juno Temple, LaKieth Stanfield, and Peter Dinklage. We do see some Tatum butt, if that gets you to the theatre. The script isn’t really interested in diving any deeper into the “why” of it all, more on the “what”. It probably could be a little shorter. It has a perfect balance between tones throughout. It’s refreshing to see a pretty realistic romance. Overall, it’s a very entertaining story with a few emotional moments and quite a few funny ones. ROOFMAN might not blow the roof off, but it’s still very good.

Love it all

"Can you toast with tea though?" -- There had been a running bit at VIFF for the odd Rolex ad and this movie has been the longest Rolex ad of them all. I liked the first two families (especially Adam Driver ♥️) but the third one dragged a lot. Why play the song from the beginning again if it isn't the end? Also, this may be a niche reference, but many moments felt like those awkward 'clue' cutscenes or moments from The Dark Pictures Anthology.

If I could give this an 11/10 I would. This is the greatest short film I have ever watched and I can’t wait to see more from the Bateman family. I totally recommend you watch this film!!!

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Edith Massey's performances across John Waters' oeuvre deserves to be studied fr fr...

Im not crying, you're crying...

I was not prepared for relentlessly sadistic this nazi sexploitation film was.