Movies
VIFF 2021: Girlfriends
The airs of a life in the world of high art are unceremoniously shattered when a young high-class fashion photographer is fired from her magazine and forced to return to her hometown in order to make ends meet. Her three childhood buddies are happy to welcome her back to the
VIFF 2021: The Worst Person in the World
In turns riotous and reflective, and boasting one of the year’s most transfixing performances, Joachim Trier’s latest is a protracted coming-of-age tale that immaculately captures that phase of early adulthood in which we’re all natural disasters leaving trails of destruction in our wakes. An aspiring surgeon when we meet her,
VIFF 2021: Queen of Glory
Director Nana Mensah vividly captures the Ghanaian-American experience of being caught between two worlds in her film, Queen of Glory. Sarah Obeng (Nana Mensah) is set to move to Ohio with her boyfriend (Adam Leon) when her mother suddenly dies. She must then pick up the pieces of her mother’s
VIFF 2021: Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror
Tracing folk horror’s dark, winding path from the influential likes of Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man to more recent fare like The Witch and Midsommar, Kier-La Janisse has fashioned an astonishingly ambitious deep dive into every recess of one of the genre cinema’s most parabolic, spiritually resonant, and culturally
VIFF 2021: Saloum
Kicking off at a velocity that would leave most Mission: Impossible entries in its dust, Jean Luc Herbulot’s breathless genre gem vaults us into a darkly poetic, wholly cinematic realm. Having orchestrated a coup in Guinea-Bissau, extracted a foreign drug lord, and absconded with a gold bounty, the Bangui Hyenas—Chaka
VIFF 2021: The Scary of Sixty-First
When college friends Noelle (Madeline Quinn) and Addie (Betsey Brown) secure an affordable apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, it’s not only too good to be true but worse than they could’ve ever imagined. They’ve barely unpacked when an exceedingly strange investigator (director Dasha Nekrasova) darkens their doorstep and shares
VIFF 2021: Records
Twenty-one years after Alan Zweig’s groundbreaking first feature documentary Vinyl, Zweig returns to the topic of compulsive record collecting with newfound introspection and a sunnier disposition. Punctuated by his signature mirror-confessionals, Records compiles colourful interviews with vinyl enthusiasts, swirling around the proverbial maxim that music has the power to connect
VIFF 2021: Red Rocket
Arriving on his estranged wife Lexi’s (Bree Elrod) dilapidated doorstep barely dressed, badly bruised, and all but penniless, semi-legendary porn star Mikey Saber (Simon Rex) needs somewhere to hole up for a while. Within a matter of days, the manic motormouth has not only talked his way into Lexi’s bed,
VIFF 2021: The Boathouse
Already anxious and skittish, Anne (Firecrackers’ Michaela Kurimsky) could’ve found a less triggering summer job. With her music professor Natalia (Kelly Martin) having gone missing, Anne’s been hired on by Natalia’s husband, Dominic (Alan Van Sprang), to be a live-in nanny at a lakeside cottage. After winning over the couple’s
VIFF 2021: Tin Can
A global outbreak of invasive fungus is spreading like wildfire, leaving its victims manifesting macabre growths that spread across their bodies, transforming them into something otherworldly. Parasitologist Fret (Anna Hopkins) might just be making headway with identifying a cure when she’s kidnapped and awakens in a locked suspended animation chamber.