Here are our capsule reviews of the Canadian Shorts After Dark line-up. Canadian Shorts After Dark Showcase Night Drives: Campfire in the Sky Co-workers gossip about their latest camping trip, and one gets decidedly weird. Created with rotoscoped animation, this short, which is part of a more extensive series, is all about the matter-of-fact way…
Guillermo del Toro co-directed a new stop-motion version of the classic story with Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. Distraught over the death of his young son Carlo, wood-carver Geppetto (David Bradley) carves a pine tree into a puppet made in Carlo’s likeness before collapsing into a drunken stupor. Feeling sympathy for the grieving man, a Wood…
A drifter joins a carnival and becomes a skilled mentalist in Nightmare Alley. On the run from his past, Stan Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) comes across a travelling carnival and is given work by its proprietor Clem Hoately (Willem Dafoe). Working as part of a psychic act of Zeena (Toni Collette) and Pete Krumbein (David Strathairn),…
Guillermo del Toro produces a film adaptation of the popular book series of young adult horror stories in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Stella Nicholls (Zoe Margaret Colletti) is a teenage girl living with her father Roy (Dean Norris) in the small town of Mill Valley. Her only friends are Auggie Hilderbrandt (Gabriel…
Neil Marshall reboots the adventures of the monster hunting hellspawn in Hellboy. Hellboy (David Harbour) is a hellspawn raised by Trevor Bruttenholm (Ian McShane) of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. While on assignment in England, Hellboy comes across a plan by the pig-like fairy Gruagach (Stephen Graham) to resurrect The Blood Queen Nimue…
A gang of kids try to escape the cartel violence in Mexico in Tigers Are Not Afraid. Estrella (Paola Lara) is an 11 year old girl in a Mexican city torn apart by local cartels and corrupt political candidate El Chino (Tenoch Huerta). Estrella makes a wish that her missing mother comes back and ends up being followed…
The war between the Kaiju and Jaegers resumes in Pacific Rim: Uprising. A decade has passed since the end of the war and Jake Pentecost (John Boyega) lives in the shadow of his war hero father and has fallen into a life of crime. After being apprehended along with teenage genius Amara Namani (Cailee Spaeny) following a…
A mute cleaning woman befriends and tries to help an amphibious creature in The Shape of Water. Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) is a mute and lonely woman, who lives in apartment above a cinema in 1960s Baltimore and takes care of her neighbour Giles (Richard Jenkins). Elisa works with her friend Zelda Fuller (Octavia Spencer) as…
The shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock‘s Psycho is broken down and analyzed in 78/52. Created with 78 set-ups and 52 shots, the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho has become one of the most iconic sequences of film history. With its use of quick cuts and suggested nudity and violence, the scene broke many taboos from the time. Multiple individuals,…
This review was originally published as part of my coverage of Hot Docs 2017 The shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock‘s Psycho is broken down and analyzed in 78/52. Created with 78 set-ups and 52 shots, the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho has become one of the most iconic sequences of film history. With its use of quick cuts and…
