INTERVIEW: Aaron Moorhead, director/cinematographer & Justin Benson director/writer of Spring

Sometimes the festival experience has a way of making you overrate films. The excitement of seeing things early with like-minded individuals, listening to filmmakers talk before and after their screenings, and the general festival aura are hard to separate from the work itself. So I won’t lie and say I didn’t re-watch Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson‘s Spring—my favorite of TIFF 2014—with a little trepidation in case the memory proved grander than reality. 109-minutes later, however, I realized I might have actually underrated it. This supernatural, sci-fi, horror, romantic drama…

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Picking Winners at the 87th Annual Academy Awards

Things look pretty cut and dry where the Academy is concerned in 2015. The Oscars are always a somewhat watered-down look at what really mattered in the past year of cinema and this installment is no exception. In fact, it may be all water at this point. That doesn’t mean there can’t be some intriguing surprises in the second-tier categories like Best Animated Feature (I really hope How to Train Your Dragon 2 loses to one of the other much more aesthetically and conceptually unique nominees) or Short Film Animated…

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REVIEW: The Babadook [2014]

“A friend of you and me” While it may be the monster lurking in the shadows—one terrorizing the imagination of a little boy already tortured by a darkness stemming from his mother’s inability to see him as anything more than the reason her husband died—The Babadook is also real. It’s the powerful manifestation of rage, guilt, frustration, and grief taking form outside its prey as well as within. Some people can cope with tragedy and move on, accepting the difference between life and death by refusing to forget that those…

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