TIFF22 REVIEW: How to Blow Up a Pipeline [2023]

If the law will not punish you, then we will. Logan (Lukas Gage) meets Shawn (Marcus Scribner) holding a red covered book within a section of a bookstore that both men are trolling for likeminded individuals. Our assumption is that the color means he’s leafing through Andreas Malm‘s nonfiction How to Blow Up a Pipeline in which the author argues for sabotage as a legitimate form of climate activism while also criticizing the pacifism and fatalism that has otherwise dominated the conversation instead. It makes sense then why Logan smirks…

Read More

REVIEW: The Assistant [2020]

What can we do? There will be people that walk out of Kitty Green‘s The Assistant with a confused shrug and that’s precisely the point. They will wonder why they just sat through an 80-minute distillation of a woman’s workday because they won’t have felt the drama or been able to read between the lines of what’s going on. Much like Matthew Macfadyen‘s human resources manager Wilcock, they’ll obtusely hide behind the veil of unsubstantiated assumption despite knowing that assumption is correct. Why? Because they’ve deluded themselves into thinking what’s…

Read More

REVIEW: Low Tide [2019]

You ready to go exploring? Just because writer/director Kevin McMullin‘s debut feature Low Tide centers on a trio of locals stuck in a New Jersey banks vacation town and forced to watch rich kids come every summer to treat them like one of the attractions with which to entertain themselves doesn’t mean it’s an “us versus them” story. Alan (Keean Johnson), Smitty (Daniel Zolghadri), and Red (Alex Neustaedter) seek to make it one by breaking into empty houses while their owners are having fun on the boardwalk, but reality soon…

Read More