Screen Anarchy

The International Film Festival Rotterdam is host to many beginning directors, but that doesn’t mean there are no regular returning guests. Writer, director and actor Guillaume Nicloux has visited the festival several times, and this year he brought a treat with him: the world première of his new thriller Mi Amor, starring Pom Klementieff and Benoît Magimel. Klementieff plays Roxy, a DJ visiting the Canary Islands to play a gig at a nightclub. With her is her friend Chloé, and the two are having a much needed break from recent emotional turmoil in their lives. But after Roxy’s performance, Chloé is nowhere to be seen and the next day she does not return to the hotel. When Roxy goes to the police they do not…

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Filmmaker David Lynch (Lost Highway, Wild At Heart, Blue Velvet) may have left this mortal plane for the next, but his influence — not to mention his filmography — survives in the work of filmmakers who found a kindred spirit in Lynch and his singular, irreducible, unreproducible worldview.    Georgia Bernstein’s debut feature-length film debut as a writer-director, Night Nurse, a psychosexually tinged neo-noir, doesn’t fall into “Lynchian” territory (blurred boundaries between the real and the unreal, the canny and the uncanny, dream logic escaping into the “real” world, among other characterizing features), but, at a minimum, it’s Lynchian-adjacent and, as such, will be of qualified interest for Lynch’s fans and filmgoers eager for original, novel filmmaking.    Set in and around an upscale retirement…

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Canada is far from the only country that has a tradition of lovingly mocking some of its stranger, often poor and delusional, white-trash subcultures (I am looking at you Australia, New Zealand and Britain). However, the Canadian flavour often takes the form of a road movie or a faux- documentary, or both. For half a century, every decade there is a breakout of this very specific “Hoser-Genre” of cinema emerges: Don Shebib’s indisputable 1970 classic Goin’ Down the Road, In the 1980s Bob and Doug Mackenzie got a feature film blow up (Strange Brew) that turned their ubiquitously quotable SCTV sketches into a cult classic. The 1990s saw Bruce MacDonald’s punk rock tour gone off the rails into comic surrealism with Hard Core Logo. In the…

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Plus: Luc Besson’s ‘Dracula’ and Renny Harlin’s ‘The Strangers: Chapter 3.’

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Director Felipe Bustos Sierra documents a spontaneous act of civic resistance in Glasgow, examining how collective presence can momentarily disrupt the mechanisms of state authority.

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Director Mejbaur Rahman Sumon’s evocative tale from the Bengali countryside about love and fate, echoing the freshness of Satyajit Ray’s cinema.

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Director Renny Harlin’s “new and hopefully final installment.”

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Keke Palmer stars, along with Jack Whitehall, Julia Duffy, Paula Pell, Mark Proksch, and Kapil Talwalkar. Celeste Hughey created the mystery-comedy series.

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Directed by Rogerio Nunes, the new animated adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s book launches into the future.

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Western Canada’s ever-expanding genre extravaganza, the Calgary Underground Film Festival (or CUFF for short) has put out its key art in anticipation of its April 16th launch. In keeping with its maximalist underground comix design ethos, and always using a local artist, the key art leans heavily into shades of purple, with a wispy hint of ghost-blue and warm orange.  Designer Nick Johnson (also the director and producer of the animated feature film Sunburnt Unicorn) prominently features CUFF’s home, the double-decker movie-house Globe Cinema. With a host of beasties taking over the place, one of them is even offering up the theatre’s iconic hotdogs, along with double passes and popcorn. Friendly monsters, these. Given the energy of the CUFF crowd and festival organizers, that these horror fiends…

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