Winter in the Blood Virgil First Raise (Chaske Spencer) wakes up in a ditch on the hardscrabble plains of Montana, hungover and badly beaten. He returns to his ranch on the reservation to find that his wife, Agnes (Julia Jones), has left him. Worse, she’s taken his beloved rifle. Virgil sets out to town find […]
Sole Survivor It’s one of the most rare occurrences possible. In the entire history of commercial flight, only fourteen times have there been crashes with a single survivor. Ky Dickens examines what it’s like to be one of these fourteen people in the new documentary, Sole Survivor. The film deals specifically with four sole survivors: […]
Pandi Mental illness is grappled with by families all across the globe, knowing nothing of racial or cultural boundaries. Pandi is an intensely intimate investigation into the death of a family member who struggled with depression. A hugely personal film about her own family, director Maria Saroja Ponnambalam explores the mysteries behind her uncle Pandi’s […]
Short Term 12 Brie Larson delivers not only a star making performance, but one of the best leading turns of the year in this emotionally charged look into the lives of workers at a facility for at risk youth with mental health issues. The de facto boss of the day shift at the group home, […]
The Naked Room Looks at childhood mental illness never get rawer than this chilling and thoughtfully stripped down look at young adults in the intake room of a Mexican hospital. Listening in to the preliminary interviews with children and parents coming to the hospital for a wide range of issues from eating disorders and suicide […]
Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse An incendiary look into a case of police brutality, Brian Lindstrom’s look at one schizophrenic man’s undignified and completely preventable death might be the heaviest film in this year’s festival line-up, but it also might be the most important. On the afternoon of September 18th, 2006 […]
Despite sometimes gimmicky style and an underlying tendency to dumb itself down in hopes of courting younger viewers, Kill Your Darlings succeeds by daring to actually humanize some of literature's most previously thought untouchable icons.
One of the best films of the year, The Broken Circle Breakdown is to predecessors Once and Blue Valentine what Johnny Cash's cover of "Hurt" was to the Trent Reznor penned original: a gorgeous, stripped down, and vastly more emotionally wrenching distillation of love and music running into tragedy.
Oil Sands Karaoke is a fun film with some great music that humanizes the often vilified faces of the men and women working in the oil sands.
While it’s undoubtedly going to make a lot of money at the box office thanks to branding and the franchise juggernaut that fuels it, Thor: The Dark World isn’t a good movie. It might appeal to those who live only for credit stingers, plot twists that can be undone mere moments after they happen, or those who enjoy comic book epics indiscriminately, but this really does represent a turning point for the character and the series it now finds itself entrenched within.
Although its low-budget trappings show, the rom-com Random Acts of Romance tells an ambitious multi-arc story and contains a lot of heart the genre has been missing as of late.
Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey A pretty standard rock documentary, Ramona Diaz’s look at Filipino cover band singer Arnel Pineda’s unlikely rise to become the lead singer of the established rock band Journey hits all the standard inspirational movie beats, and somewhat unwittingly paints the band itself in a less than flattering light. Overcoming poverty […]
How to Use Guys with Secret Tips Despite a set-up that would lend itself very easily to descending into rom-com clichés, Lee Won-suk’s quirky and offbeat female empowerment story offers a hearty amount of laughs and only a modicum of sickly sweet sentiment when necessary. Labelled by her own co-workers as unremarkable, dense, and defective, […]
Tales from the Dark Part 1 (Centerpiece Presentation) A delightfully old school anthology of creepy ghost stories, the first installment of Tales from the Dark (both of which were released in China earlier this year) consists of three consistently spooky and amusing shorts about characters all trying to profit off the deaths and misfortunes of […]
The 17th annual Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival kicks off this week, and Dork Shelf is here with a look at many of the film's playing this year's line-up dedicated to bringing some of the best in Asian Cinema to local screens every November.
