TIFF19 REVIEW: Tammy’s Always Dying [2019]

I just want to play the game. You have to give credit to any story that allows its despicable characters to be despicable without also demanding forgiveness from their victim. This is especially true in tales concerning a parent and child considering society seems to crave this ideal that the former is due some benefit of the doubt they’ve never earned. Screenwriter Joanne Sarazen refuses to go that route. She won’t pander to audiences by making Tammy MacDonald (Felicity Huffman) anything but the narcissistic, alcoholic screw-up devoid of self-control she…

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REVIEW: The Spanish Prisoner [1998]

Dog my cats. Anyone who’s on social media has seen the “name” memes where your “whatever name” is formed by that of the first pet you owned and your grandmother’s maiden name—or some riff on this pattern. Everyone does it because it’s fun and they’ve been trained like sheep to participate in such activities so their feeds remain pop culturally relevant. But then you hear the jokes about how the meme is perfectly suited to mine a person’s security question answers due to the specific nature of those details being…

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INTERVIEW: Jalmari Helander, writer/director of Big Game

After finding success from his debut feature Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale—an expansion of a world he created through two previous shorts all released together by Oscilloscope—Finnish writer/director Jalmari Helander did what many European filmmakers do and went English-language for his sophomore effort. But he did so on his terms by once again writing his own script and recruiting familiar faces to act against the newly accessible stable of international stars provided to him. The result is action romp Big Game and it has the potential of turning even more…

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REVIEW: Cake [2014]

“Forgive me” It may not be the best film utilizing its melancholic subject matter, but Cake is not as bad as the critical sphere appears to want us to believe. The credit for this goes to screenwriter Patrick Tobin for distilling his character’s grief, depression, and malaise into a precisely calculated 102-minute rebirth. We receive a lot of information through the interactions of people, expressive postures towards specific situations, and the blackly comic exchanges on behalf of Claire Bennett (Jennifer Aniston), a woman desperately trying to hide behind the cynical…

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