TIFF: Margaret Qualley and Christopher Abbott in ‘Sanctuary’

By Abe Friedtanzer

Two-handers aren’t easy to pull off. They require strong actors who understand how to play off each other well enough to keep things interesting for the duration of an entire film. Fortunately, Zachary Wigon’s Sanctuary makes a great case for this format, showcasing excellent performances from its stars, Margaret Qualley and Christopher Abbott. It's a 96-minute power struggle rollercoaster that never lets up…

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Sundance: "The World To Come" review

by Jason Adams

As a writer it must be said (or written even!) that I love words. Perhaps on occasion, it has been said and written, more than I ought to. It's the romance of my life. You can spend hours staring in the eyes of one -- erasing it, putting it back, looking for it the absolute best of partners. It's in words where I find meaning, too much and too often -- the experience of a thing is here and gone but once you've dug it back up and defined it, encased it into the tombs of steely-sided capital letters, well then it's a thing, right and proper. Understanding one's life, the un-understandable, becomes a matter of word puzzles.

It's this same tension, between word and feeling, that fuels Mona Fastvold's same-sex romance The World To Come, and like its heroine its that tension that very nearly undoes it...

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Sundance: “On the Count of Three” review

By Abe Friedtanzer

 

Meeting characters at a moment where they want to end their lives is a complicated endeavor. It’s important to introduce them and explain who they are while communicating what has happened to get them to this mental place. Such narratives are often melancholy, but they can also be unexpectedly funny, as is the case with On the Count of Three...

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Review: Aubrey Plaza in "Black Bear"

by Matt St Clair

Though her trademark had been deadpan comedy, Aubrey Plaza has shown a recent knack for giving bold dramatic performances as obsessive women. Three years ago, in Ingrid Goes West, she immersed herself into the role of Ingrid Thorburn who was not unlike a female Travis Bickle on Instagram. In Black Bear, Plaza is on a career-best level as Allison, an actress-turned-filmmaker with possibly ulterior motives as she stays with an unsuspecting couple in an isolated cabin...

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Review: "Possessor" is a true provocation

by Tony Ruggio

A worm-infested apple doesn’t fall far from a rotting tree. In only his second feature film, baby Brandon Cronenberg proves he’s everything his father David was in his heyday: stylish, provocative, and interested in more than the gore and sleazy depravity that often grab headlines, although he’s clearly interested in those as well. Set in an alternate techno-horror 2008 of corporate espionage, where agents like Tasya (Andrea Riseborough) use brain-implant technology to “possess” other human beings for carrying out assassinations, Possessor is possibly the most graphic film made since Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist. Here it’s not so much what happens, but how it happens, how it’s framed on screen via some truly horrific and terrific practical effects.

When we meet Tasya, she’s at the top of her game yet beginning to slip. As Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character puts it, “the older you get, the harder it gets”...

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