Last year's "Tom at the Farm" looked very much like an in-between film for Xavier Dolan; small in scale and lacking the faces familiar from his previous work (excepting the director himself), it appears that it served as a nice change of pace following the epic (and no doubt exhausting) masterpiece "Laurence Anyways", allowing Dolan to catch his breath a little before taking on the colossal "Mommy". As with "Laurence", "Mommy" is, in the best possible way, a draining experience,…
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Have You Seen My Movie? 2016
Whilst watching Have You Seen My Movie?, it was impossible to shake off one particular, nagging question: how the hell did they clear all the copyrights for this? Presumably, like Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinema, it invokes some sort of fair use/quotation-style policy, else it would involve an insurmountable pile of legal work. It can also be assumed that, as with Los Angeles Plays Itself, a commercial release will not be possible, thus placing this in the LFF's Experimenta strand --…
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I Saw the TV Glow 2024
Hands-down the finest film of 2024, Jane Schoenbrun's jaw-dropping sophomore feature I Saw the TV Glow begins, almost in medias res, in the analogue mid-90s, when teenagers Maddy and Owen bond over young adult TV show The Pink Opaque. When Maddy suddenly goes missing, presumed dead, the programme is cancelled; but she resurfaces eight years later, prompting a confounded Owen to rewatch the frankly terrifying series finale. This haunting, self-reflexive film wears its influences on its sleeve, and the core…
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Black Fruit 2024
Schwarze Früchte—which centres on Lalo and Karla, two black twentysomethings in Hamburg—gets off to a strong start, but its back half is horribly uneven; the low point comes in the form of the fifth episode, which is more or less a chamber piece, one in which the players aren't given much of interest to work with. With better writing, this stark change of pace might have worked, but instead it highlights how the show thrives when it's out on the…
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Funeral Parade of Roses 1969
With its surprisingly frank depiction of gay subculture in 60s Japan, Matsumoto's slice of experimenta may be light years ahead of its time, but is sadly quite an ordeal to sit through. Stylistically, there's quite a lot to like here, but there's no real narrative cohesion, so it's a tough film to engage with. About half an hour from the end there's one of the least convincing knife murders ever committed to celluloid, which livens things up with some fine,…
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Red Rooms 2023
With its firm emphasis on the aftermath of violence, Pascal Plante's highly implicit film has, on the face of it, little for gorehounds to sink their teeth into, yet its non-transgressive appearance should fool no one: the black-hearted "Red Rooms" is strong meat, and a difficult film to shake off. It is anchored by a terrifically unnerving performance from Juliette Gariépy, who stars as Kelly-Anne, a successful model obsessed with the trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), who is charged…
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