Waves – TIFF 2019 Review

Ever since his ultra-low budget debut with Krisha in 2015 , Trey Edward Shults has been an indie darling of sorts from his very first splash onto the film festival scene. Already making tight acquaintances with major contemporary motion picture distribution house A24, the majority of his film’s follow a basic central narrative on an […]

Cause She’s Real: How “Hustlers” is Jennifer Lopez’s Best Career Move Yet

“Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got / I’m still I’m still Jenny from the block” For most of her career, she’s been emphasizing her humble roots and her childhood in the Bronx, to various degrees of praise and ridicule. It’s all genuine, of course: her parents, a night-shift worker at an insurance […]

Wasp Network – TIFF 2019 Review

In the frenetic heat of festival season, it’s never a good sign to hear the news of a film that you’ve been excited to see for months, is supposedly being re-cut, after being helmed with mixed reactions from early festival goers. It happened last year at the Toronto International Film Festival with Outlaw King; which […]

Radioactive – TIFF 2019 Review

The greatest threat to modern cinema isn’t streaming services, comic book flicks, or even trend-setting cinematic universes… It’s the rise of the Oscar-bait biopic. Taking the life of an influential figure, and minimizing their entire career into a cramped two hour-sub run time seems ludicrous. The existence of this genre to begin with, is simply […]

Sound of Metal – TIFF 2019 Review

There’s a brief moment in Sound of Metal, the debut film from The Place Beyond the Pines scribe Darius Marder, that stopped me dead in my tracks. Ruben (Riz Ahmed) is sleeping next to a man who is snoring, and the shot is played for laughs. It harshly cuts to Ruben, who’s a metal drummer […]

Joker – TIFF 2019 Review

In recent years, with the evolution of contemporary cinema, numerous controversies have risen and fallen throughout different timelines of film history. In 2019, our most barbaric form of battling discourse is surprisingly with Todd Phillip’s Joker, a film that is steaming up more traction than it ever has the right to contain. People are equally […]

The Friend – TIFF 2019 Review

Well, I’ve got to say that this was the most unexpected return-to-form collaboration between Jason Segel and Dakota Johnson since The Five Year Engagement! The Friend is directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite and it stars Jason Segel, Casey Affleck, and Dakota Johnson. It revolves around a true story about a terminally ill wife, who has only […]