GREG KLYMKIW'S BEST FILMS OF 2017 presented in alphabetical order - By Greg Klymkiw

Greg Klymkiw selects

THE 20 BEST FEATURE FILMS OF 2017

(in alphabetical order)

BITCH tied with MOST BEAUTIFUL ISLAND
Women are knocking genre cinema out of the park this year and turning it topsy turvy in all the right ways. Marianna Palka's provocatively titled Bitch is a savage feminist satire that's as creepy as it is funny and it takes the kind of unexpected narrative turns that are not only aesthetically tantalizing, but yield the kind of original and utterly uncompromising work that restores one's faith in cinema. Stranger even still, is that it slowly develops into a deeply moving tale of redemption as a philandering, mean-spirited husband is faced with huge challenges when his loyal, long-suffering wife turns into a "dog". Most Beautiful Island, is a terrific debut feature from Writer-director-Star Ana Asensio that captures the lonely, desperate lives of illegal "aliens" in New York with an indelible sense of observation that borders on Neo-realism. The final half of the picture, once Luciana enters the secret, horrifying dangerous world where illegal aliens are used as pawns for the rich in a deadly game, is unbearably suspenseful. Asensio paces these sequences with a creepy-crawly slow burn and it's impossible to sit still. Squirming is the order of the day for anyone watching this section of the film.

BREADWINNER, THE
From Aircraft Pictures and director Nora Twomey comes The Breadwinner, a harrowing, thrilling and inspiring film (blessed with a great screenplay adaptation by Anita Doron) of the young adult novel by Deborah Ellis in which a young girl in Afghanistan must pose as a boy in order to help her family when their patriarchal head is imprisoned. The suspense during the final third is almost unbearable. This is one of the best animated feature films I've seen in years.

CAMBODIAN SPRING, A
Director Chris Kelly serves up compulsive viewing as he employs a Direct Cinema approach by training his cameras on Venerable Loun Sovath, Toul Srey Pov and Tepp Vanny - three activists fighting against the corruption of the Cambodian Government. Yes, the film is not without uplifting moments, but the cumulative effect is sheer devastation and some very harsh realities that elicit copious tears.

CRESCENT, THE
As events unfurl, this tale of a mother and son dealing with grief comes at us with a meticulous pace and plenty of cerebral mind-blowing explosions of visual fireworks. Director Seth A. Smith eventually unleashes all-out, drawer-filling scares and in one delicious set piece, the kind of sickening visceral splatter that horror aficionados will love. It's always lovely seeing a quiet, intelligent horror film that channels the energies and artistry of RKO's master of atmospheric chills Val Lewton (The Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, The Seventh Victim, The Body Snatcher).

CURE FOR WELLNESS, A
Director Gore (The Ring) Verbinski delivers one of the strangest pieces of gothic shenanigans in long time as a young corporate executive is sent on a bizarre mission to a mysterious wellness clinic in the Swiss Alps so he can obtain a signature from his company's CEO. What he discovers is sheer creepy-crawly terror. Stylish, indulgent and endowed with an effective slow-burn pace, this feels like a Hammer Horror movie as directed by Michael Cimino on lithium.

DARKEST HOUR
In Darkest Hour, director Joe Wright expertly weaves the tale of Prime Minister Winston Churchill during the early days of WWII - from his appointment as PM and through to his historical "we shall fight on the beaches" speech to parliament. Gary Oldman plays the irascible orator with verve and passion. In many ways, Oldman is the movie. The film is little more than war propaganda, but it's first-rate war propaganda and the fictional sequence involving old Winnie riding the London Underground is insanely, gloriously stirring and moving. His performance overall, moved me to tears.

DISAPPEARANCE
I do so enjoy entering a frigid cinematic icebox to revel in the spectacle of a parent and adult child acrimoniously slashing away at each other. Boudewijn Koole's extraordinary film is a magnificent new entry into this time-honoured/tested/proven dramatic tradition and serves up plenty of roiling bitterness amidst aching convulsions twixt a Mother and Daughter in the icy climes of rural Norway. Lots of sex, death and ice-fishing for good measure.

DISASTER ARTIST, THE
Based on the memoir by actor Greg Sestero, director-leading-man James Franco and co-star (his real-life brother Dave Franco) take us into similar territory Tim Burton occupied with his glorious biopic Ed Wood. Here we get the strangely moving, heartfelt and often hilarious tale of Tommy Wiseau, the "auteur" who made The Room (often considered the best bad movie ever made). I still haven't seen Wiseau's film, but it hasn't been an impediment to my thorough enjoyment of Franco's film.

DO DONKEYS ACT?
David Redmon and Ashley Sabin train their cameras upon living beings that have been abused and subjected to appalling inhumanity. We follow the film's four-legged subjects from their admittance to the heavenly refuges of donkey sanctuaries, then through a variety of medical/grooming procedures, eventually their daily lives and finally, the peace of what will be their existence until they leave this Earth. Astonishing Direct Cinema images are accompanied by poetic narration, beautifully delivered by Willem Dafoe.

EUTHANIZER
Though this is not a period piece, its aesthetic feels gloriously in line with the existential angst (primarily of the male persuasion) that so defined the cinema of the 70s. This first feature from Finland by Teemu Nikki is the deeply shocking, insanely romantic, sickeningly horrifying, bleakly/blackly funny and often graceful tale of a car mechanic who moonlights as a discount pet euthanizer. It's a revenge picture. It's a love story. And yes, it is hallucinogenically original.

FIRST REFORMED tied with TWIN PEAKS (THE RETURN) SEASON THREE
Two elder statesmen of American Cinema did some of their greatest work in 2017. Paul Schrader knocks it out of the park with this compulsive psycho-thriller about an alcoholic priest (Ethan Hawke - never better) haunted by his son's death, obsessed with a young widow (Amanda Seyfried) and facing a deep crisis of faith. Imagine Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light crossed with Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest and Schrader's own classic screenplay for Taxi Driver. Chillingly austere. David Lynch pulled off this seemingly impossible task - he return to the Twin Peaks world of his legendary Mark Frost collaboration and did so with mind blowing style, compulsive narrative aplomb and sheer avant-garde experimentation. It's technically a TV series, but in reality, it's an 18-hour-long feature film - so much so I wish he'd release it on Blu-Ray as one long movie sans closing credits (though including the closing visuals for each and every "episode").

FLORIDA PROJECT, THE
A sleazy motel in Florida, just outside Walt Disney World, a precocious, vibrant little girl, her drug addicted hustler single Mom and a kindly caretaker (played by Willem Dafoe no less) are the backdrop and characters in Sean (Tangerine) Baker's magical ode to childhood amidst squalor. A gloriously original film that both soars and breaks your heart.

GOOD TIME tied with LOWLIFE
Crime was the indie order of the day in 2017. A bank heist goes horribly wrong. Two brothers are on the run. One gets caught, the other doesn't. The free bro begins a mad odyssey into an underworld of danger and violence to spring his incarcerated bro from the hoosegow. We never know where it's all going to go, but every turn it takes shocks, surprises and keeps us jacked. The Safdie Brothers write and direct within inches of their lives. The whole cast knocks us on our collective asses, but Robert (Twilight) Pattinson soars in ways most actors merely dream of. Though director Ryan Prows is clearly in Quentin Tarantino's debt with Lowlife, he wisely places most of the emphasis upon mad, wildly operatic melodrama. The movie is as moving as it is grittily shocking and deeply, darkly funny. Luchadores, those glorious masked wrestlers of Mexico are emblematic of all that is good and evil - heroes and villains to the common man, performing great feats of gymnastic warfare in the ring and dazzlingly costumed in ancient Aztec tradition. Set against a sleazy crime backdrop, we follow the adventures of wrestler El Monstruo who works as a strong-arm for an evil gringo gangster who kidnaps illegal "aliens" to use in the underground organ harvesting trade.

HOPE tied with THERE IS A HOUSE HERE
Most viewers want things served up simply. They won't get that with Hope. Alan Zweig's sequel to Hurt continues the story of fallen Canadian Hero Steve Fonyo who survives the hell of a home invasion assault and decides to enter rehab. The director bravely keeps the cameras rolling as Fonyo somewhat petulantly puts some major juju upon Zweig. Fonyo makes it clear he's only doing rehab for the film. He expects the film (and filmmaker) to provide him with what he needs. What he gets is so much more. What we, the audience get, is the light (albeit murky) of redemption and a movie of dogged, gritty artistry. With There is a House Here, Zweig takes us on a journey into the lives and land of those who live in the country's most isolated, Northern regions. With Tatanniq Idlout (Inuk rock star Lucie Idlout) as his tour guide, Alan Zweig seeks answers to questions he has about the Third World conditions in his own country. This is a film about seeking answers, about learning something its filmmaker wants to know, and in so doing, casting the glow of illumination upon us all - forcing us to confront how little we know about anything and how life (and filmmaking/art), should indeed always be about exploration.

I LOVE YOU, DADDY
Standup comic Louis C.K. writes, directs and stars in this gorgeously photographed (in monochrome no less) love letter to Woody Allen's Manhattan that finally lives and breathes on its own steam. This portrait of a father's relationship with his teenage daughter (and her affair with a man 50+ years her senior) is so piquant and moving that the tears it elicits from viewers are alternately due to laughter and the movie's deep emotional core.

LAST MEN IN ALEPPO
Last Men in Aleppo is a thrilling, exciting, terrifying, sad, sickening, brave, brilliant and deeply moving documentary portrait by Feras Fayyad of Syria's "White Helmets" - firemen, paramedics and other rescue workers who volunteer (with their very lives in many cases), to search through the carnage of fresh bomb strikes in the city of Aleppo to save those still breathing and to retrieve the remains of those who are dead. Adhering with considerable rigour to the style of Cinéma Direct, it follows two primary subjects as they plunge into the chasm of a living Hell. We not only fear for the lives of everyone onscreen, but the filmmakers. This is film artistry of the highest order.

SWAN, THE
Icelandic screenwriter-Director Ása Helga Hjörleifsdótirr adapts the Guðbergur Bergsson novel with taste, restraint and artistry of a very high order. A nine-year-old girl, living in state-imposed exile at her aunt and uncle's remote rural farm after a shoplifting conviction in the city, is a story so exquisitely, delicately unveiled that it confounds all expectations one might have of both coming-of-age and fish-out-of-water tales. Surrounded by fields, meadows and rugged, imposing mountains, these are wide open spaces that feel horrifically claustrophic. The film's tiny dollops of magical realism are perfect punctuation points to an experience that is as strangely creepy as it is deeply and profoundly moving.

UNARMED VERSES tied with VANCOUVER: NO FIXED ADDRESS
Two terrific documentary features directed by two guys named Charles. Charles Officer's new film is shot in a Cinéma Direct style, but with plenty of exquisitely moving poetic sequences. Unarmed Verses follows 12-year-old Francine Valentine, a sweet, smart and talented young lady living in Villaways, an isolated community housing project in Toronto that is on the verge of decimation. This is a very important film about home, community and how, in this modern world, it's on the verge of extinction. Charles Wilkinson has made some of the most important documentaries ever wrought on the subject of the environment (Peace Out, Haida Gwaii: On the Edge of the World). His new film is, on one hand, a history of the great west coast Canadian city, and on the other, a powerful exploration of a housing crisis that's forcing people into homelessness and displacement.

VIOLET
Grief is the subject of the extraordinary feature-length debut by Bas Devos, a film that is indelibly infused with the delicate beauty and subtlety of everything its title, Violet, represents. Devos takes us on the haunting journey of a frail adolescent as he wends his way through a mourning process that is filled with such sadness and confusion that the film is as unbearable as it is compulsively relentless in its exploration of loss. The filmmaker wisely employs the standard-frame Academy ratio, used to such astonishing effect in Son of Saul by Laszlo Nemes. This is cinematic storytelling in its most powerful, evocative form. Devos uses image to express emotion, but to also evoke it within us.

WHAT WILL PEOPLE SAY
In What Will People Say, the teenage daughter of hard-working immigrants living in Oslo, is at odds with her fundamentalist family, then kidnapped and shipped to Pakistan where she is to be "trained" to be dutiful. This is an extremely promising debut feature for actress/art director Iram Haq. Replete with glorious cultural details and stirring family drama, Haq layers her film with a myriad of complexities beneath a solidly simple coat hanger. It is a movie as filled with joy, love and sheer humanity as it is with chilling, suspenseful tension.

GREG KLYMKIW'S TEN BEST SHORT FILMS OF 2017 in alphabetical order - By Greg Klymkiw

I saw over 100 short films this past year.

These are my 10 favourites from 2017.

Greg Klymkiw selects

THE TEN BEST SHORT FILMS OF 2017

(in alphabetical order)

BARGAINING WITH THE FUTURE
Lasha Mowchun's moving, poetic and playful documentary about climate change.

BICKFORD PARK
Dane Clark & Linsey Stewart's sweetly, enchantingly melancholy romantic pas de deux.

CHARLES
Dominic Etienne Simard's gorgeous, bittersweet (mostly) monochrome life journey.

DOMUS
Rhayne Vermette's experimental bio-doc is an exquisite two-by-four to the senses.

HOMER_a, HOMER_b
Milos Mitrovic & Conor Sweeney's creepy duo of low-fi Homer Simpson madness.

SHADOW NETTES
Phillip Barker demonstrates angling with one visual jaw-dropper after another.

SHE CAME KNOCKING
John Ainslie's grim, scary thriller is a creepy throat-catcher of a very high order.

TESLA WORLD LIGHT, THE
Matthew Rankin's glorious, dreamy ode to Nikola Tesla soars like no other.

THREADS
Torill Kove's lovely and simple animated tale about the threads that bind us all.

WE FORGOT TO BREAK UP
Chandler Levack's compulsive slice of life builds cleverly to glorious musical 3rd act.

THE PHILADELPHIA STORY - Review by Greg Klymkiw - Dazzling Cukor Dazzling Criterion

The Philadelphia Story (1940)
Starring: Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, James Stewart, John Howard
Ply. Philip Barry
Scr. Donald Ogden Stewart
Dir. George Cukor

Review By Greg Klymkiw

There are three significant men in the romantic life of socialite Tracy Lord (Katherine Hepburn). Born into wealth and privilege, she's dumped the irascible rich boy/playboy C.K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) and has rushed into the complacency of marrying George Kittredge (John Howard), the dweeb-ish self-made millionaire.

But, there is a dark horse for her affections charging across the horizon of romance.

Tracy, however, is a force to be reckoned with - perhaps one of the most dazzling, significant female characters in the entire history of Hollywood romantic screwball comedies. Each of these men adore and appreciate her, but for very different reasons. It's these reasons, or rather, declarations, that brilliantly say as much about the individual male characters, as they do about Tracy herself.

Tracy is a walking, talking, living, breathing contradiction. In that sense, she's a full-blooded human being - one we could all do well aspiring to.

Perhaps the most interesting observation comes from Macauley "Mike" Connor (James Stewart), the reporter charged with Tracy's upcoming high society wedding. He's as full of contradiction about Tracy as Tracy is herself when he says (during one of the most romantic/funny scenes in movie history):

"You're wonderful. There's a magnificence in you, Tracy... a magnificence that comes out of your eyes, in your voice, in the way you stand there, in the way you walk. You're lit from within, Tracy. You've got fires banked down in you, hearth-fires and holocausts... No, you're made out of flesh and blood. That's the blank, unholy surprise of it. You're the golden girl, Tracy. Full of life and warmth and delight."

Ah, but the man she is about to marry, sees no real mystery. He declares:

"You're like some marvelous, distant, well, queen, I guess. You're so cool and fine and always so much your own. There's a kind of beautiful purity about you, Tracy, like, like a statue."

A statue? Uh, she's really going to marry this clown? He likens her to an inanimate object - albeit an objet d'art, but an object nonetheless. Worse yet, Kittredge adds that it's these inanimate qualities that "... I first worshipped you for from afar".

Tracy's having none of it:

"I don't want to be worshipped," she declares. "I want to be loved."

It's the philandering scoundrel C.K. Dexter Haven who seems to nail Tracy to the cross of self-discovery when he charges:

"You'll never be a first class human being or a first class woman until you've learned to have some regard for human frailty."

Dexter's quips, as rendered so cuttingly by the epitome of romantic male leads, Cary Grant, cut especially deep. This one in particular gets to the core of Tracy's journey throughout the film, an odyssey in which she learns that class, in all the meanings of the word, should intimately be all about examining and accepting the frailties of all humanity (including one's own).

In so doing, love is indeed the ultimate goal, but that's the genius of this film. We're not just talking about romantic love, but love and acceptance in all its forms. Directed within an inch of its life by the peerless George Cukor and gorgeously adapted by Donald Ogden Stewart from Philip Barry's hit play, The Philadelphia Story has all the nuttiness, romance and machine-gun-fire dialogue one would want from the genre. However, it goes that extra distance. It has heart, soul and the kind of intelligence that makes it universal.

The picture might have been made in 1940, but it speaks to all ages for all time.

I guess that's why they call 'em masterpieces.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** (5-Stars)

The Philadelphia Story is available on a gorgeous Criterion Collection Blu-Ray that includes a new 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray, an audio commentary from 2005 featuring film scholar Jeanine Basinger, In Search of Tracy Lord, a new documentary about the origin of the character and her social milieu, a new piece about actor Katharine Hepburn’s role in the development of the film, two full episodes of The Dick Cavett Show from 1973, featuring rare interviews with Hepburn, plus an excerpt of a 1978 interview from that show with director George Cukor, the Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of the film from 1943, featuring an introduction by filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille, a restoration demonstration, the trailer and an essay by critic Farran Smith Nehme.

THE SWAN, THE SHAPE OF WATER - TIFF 2017: One Sang, the Other Didn't - Capsule Reviews of a winner and a loser at TIFF 2017 by Greg Klymkiw

TIFF 2017 featured a Feature Debut that Soared and A Veteran's Work That Sank

Capsule Reviews of The Swan and The Shape of Water
By Greg Klymkiw

SWAN, THE ****
Dir. Ása Helga Hjörleifsdótirr
Icelandic screenwriter-Director Ása Helga Hjörleifsdótirr adapts the Guðbergur Bergsson novel with taste, restraint and artistry of a very high order. A nine-year-old girl, living in state-imposed exile at her aunt and uncle's remote rural farm after a shoplifting conviction in the city, is a story so exquisitely, delicately unveiled that it confounds all expectations one might have of both coming-of-age and fish-out-of-water tales. Surrounded by fields, meadows and rugged, imposing mountains, these are wide open spaces that feel horrifically claustrophic. The film's tiny dollops of magical realism are perfect punctuation points to an experience that is as strangely creepy as it is deeply and profoundly moving.

SHAPE OF WATER, THE *
Dir. Guillermo del Toro
I love listening to Guillermo del Toro talk about classic cinema. Damn, I wish he made movies as engaging and exciting as his rapturous lectures, but I've mostly not responded to his work. This abominably twee fairy-tale-rendering of Jack Arnold's Creature From the Black Lagoon is full of "progressive" touches completely out of touch with the period in which the film is set. Worst yet, we must suffer through Sally Hawkins (as a mute janitor no less) falling in love with a smelly fish-man trapped by nasty Michael Shannon in a research facility. It's so sickening, one doesn't so much think about the pretentious "shape" of water, but rather the "stench" of the water creature's genitals.

The Swan and The Shape of Water played at TIFF 2017

FIRST REFORMED, THE FLORIDA PROJECT, I LOVE YOU DADDY - TIFF 2017 - More 4-Star **** Pictures Dazzle at TIFF - Capsule Review Roundup By Greg Klymkiw

The terrific pictures at TIFF 2017, just kept on on coming.

3 Four-Star Capsule Reviews of
First Reformed, The Florida Project, I Love You Daddy

By Greg Klymkiw

FIRST REFORMED ****
Dir. Paul Schrader
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried
One of the elder statesmen of American Cinema has possibly pulled off his greatest work with a dense psychological thriller. Paul Schrader knocks it out of the park with this compulsive tale of an alcoholic priest (Ethan Hawke - never better) haunted by his son's death, obsessed with a young widow (Amanda Seyfried) and facing a deep crisis of faith. Imagine Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light crossed with Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest and Schrader's own classic screenplay for Taxi Driver. Chillingly austere.

FLORIDA PROJECT, THE ****
dir. Sean Baker
In a sleazy motel in Florida, just outside Walt Disney World, we follow the lives of a precocious, vibrant little girl, her drug addicted hustler single Mom and a kindly caretaker (beautifully played by Willem Dafoe no less). This oddball backdrop and rich characters comprise Sean (Tangerine) Baker's magical ode to childhood amidst squalor. A gloriously original film that both soars and breaks your heart.

I LOVE YOU, DADDY ****
Dir. Louis C.K.
Standup comic Louis C.K. writes, directs and stars in this gorgeously photographed (in monochrome no less) love letter to Woody Allen's Manhattan that finally lives and breathes on its own steam. This portrait of a father's relationship with his teenage daughter (and her affair with a man 50+ years her senior) is so piquant and moving that the tears it elicits from viewers are alternately due to laughter and the movie's deep emotional core.

First Reformed, The Florida Project, I Love You Daddy all played at TIFF 2017

THE BREADWINNER, DARKEST HOUR, THE DISASTER ARTIST - TIFF 2017 - Roundup of 4-Star **** Capsule Reviews By Greg Klymkiw

The terrific pictures at TIFF 2017, keep on coming.

3 Four-Star Capsule Reviews of
The Breadwinner, Darkest Hour & The Disaster Artist

By Greg Klymkiw

BREADWINNER, THE (2017) ****
Dir. Nora Twomey
From Aircraft Pictures and director Nora Twomey comes The Breadwinner, a harrowing, thrilling and inspiring film (blessed with a great screenplay adaptation by Anita Doron) of the young adult novel by Deborah Ellis in which a young girl in Afghanistan must pose as a boy in order to help her family when their patriarchal head is imprisoned. The suspense during the final third is almost unbearable. This is one of the best animated feature films I've seen in years.

DARKEST HOUR (2017) ****
Dir. Joe Wright
Starring: Gary Oldman,Ben Mendelsohn, Kristin Scott Thomas
In Darkest Hour, director Joe Wright expertly weaves the tale of Prime Minister Winston Churchill during the early days of WWII - from his appointment as PM and through to his historical "we shall fight on the beaches" speech to parliament. Gary Oldman plays the irascible orator with verve and passion. In many ways, Oldman is the movie. The film is little more than war propaganda, but it's first-rate war propaganda and the fictional sequence involving old Winnie riding the London Underground is insanely, gloriously stirring and moving. His performance overall, moved me to tears.

DISASTER ARTIST, THE (2017) ****
Dir. James Franco
Starring: James Franco, Greg Franco, Seth Rogen
Based on the memoir by actor Greg Sestero, director-leading-man James Franco and co-star (his real-life brother Dave Franco) take us into similar territory Tim Burton occupied with his glorious biopic Ed Wood. Here we get the strangely moving, heartfelt and often hilarious tale of Tommy Wiseau, the "auteur" who made The Room (often considered the best bad movie ever made). I still haven't seen Wiseau's film, but it hasn't been an impediment to my thorough enjoyment of Franco's film.

The Breadwinner, Darkest Hour and The Disaster Artist are TIFF 2017 presentations.

BICKFORD PARK - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Skateboard pas de deux at TIFF 2017

The babe suffers, but NOT in silence. Ain't it always the way?

Bickford Park (2017)
Dir. Dane Clark, Linsey Stewart
Starring: Lianne Balaban

Review By Greg Klymkiw

So you've had to suffer through listening to your long-haired loser husband tinkling the ivories in the basement as he caterwauls his way through a contemptibly worthless tune he's composed and now, after a long day at work, you're sitting in your car reading a book, conveniently avoiding home.

The phone rings.

It's hubby. He wants you to pick something up on your way back. Uh, what's he been doing all day? He delivers the expected answer.

"I meant to go out, but I got pretty deep into it today."

Trying to imagine what bottomless chasm of talent-bereft hack-dom he'd plunged into fills you, no doubt, with utter dread.

Such is the current lot in life for Jill (Lianne Balaban), a bright gorgeous thirty-something who spends her evenings jogging the streets as far away from hearth, home and hubby as possible. One evening during a restorative sojourn in sneakers and shorts, she spies a lone skateboard. It beckons. She gets on board. Her attempt is shaky, and perhaps even more so when the owner of the board, a hunky dude at least ten years her junior, claims it as his own and asks for its return.

This delightful new form of physical activity (and escape from the emptiness of domesticity) sends her straight to a sporting goods store. It doesn't take long before she return to the park to try out her new skateboard. Happily, the hunky dude shows up.

The lessons begin - a pas de deux on wheels. What sparks will fly? Is romance in the air? Watching Bickford Park, one certainly hopes so. Smartly, directors Dane Clark and Linsey Stewart don't take any expected turns. There's a reason why they chosen to film in monochrome - shades of grey are always more interesting.

Their film is sweet and enchanting but ultimately infused with melancholy. We want to spend a lot more time with its characters, we want to see it play out well beyond its running time, we get expected delights to be sure, but it's the unexpected hands we're dealt that offer the kind of layers of complexity that send us out of the theatre with so much more than the by-rote fodder most contemporary romantic comedies pass off as clever.

Bickford Park delivers something far richer.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

Bickford Park plays at TIFF 2017

THE DROP-IN - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Beauty Parlour Catfight Action at TIFF 2017

Hmmm. Will there be a catfight in the shop tonight?

The Drop-In (2017)
Dir. Naledi Jackson
Starring: Mouna Traoré, Oluniké Adeliyi

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The Drop-In, an action thriller with an undercurrent of science fiction and politically-charged thematics, provides a raft of reasons why hair stylists closing shop for the day should never accept a customer with no appointment who pops by, desperate for a quick "do". In fact, it's probably best to keep the door locked and the curtains drawn whilst sweeping up the floor. But, it's a movie, eh. The door has to be open, or there wouldn't be a movie.

And so it is that a pretty stylist (Mouna Traoré) accepts a babe-o-licious drop-in (Oluniké Adeliyi) for a quick braid job. As the handiwork in the chair unfolds, it seems like both women harbour agendas and secrets which lead to a furious catfight of MMA gymnastics. Who will survive? What will be left of them?

First-time director Naledi Jackson displays considerable gifts for building tension and when the movie shifts to all-out fisticuffs, she handles the proceedings exactly how a director should. The superb stunt/fight coordination is presented so that we can actually appreciate/enjoy it with no annoying herky-jerky shots (mucking up the geography/choreography of the fight), endless closeups and ADHD-style cutting. God knows I detest the incompetence of filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and Sam Mendes who continually commit these cardinal action movie sins in pictures that have all the money and time in the world to do it properly.

The Drop-In, however, clearly had very little money and time to pull itself off and yet it puts so many contemporary studio genre extravaganzas to shame since Naledi doesn't resort to the tin-eyed. ham-fisted mechanics that filmmakers (who should supposedly know better) do in film after wretched film. There is one disappointment I had through this, especially given Naledi's clear directorial gifts.

The film is set in a hair stylist shop. The joint is overloaded with so many natural implements of violent carnage that are not (sadly) employed in all their glory. Clippers, scissors, blades, shears, curling irons, barbicide (oh magnificent chemicals!) and, of course, plenty of mirrors for bodies to go sailing into and allowing for shards of shattered glass - the list of items "natural" to the setting is endless.

One of the best classical examples of how a screenplay (and director) structure such a scene for maximum impact is Alfred Hitchcock's Torn Curtain. In an old country kitchen in East Germany, a mathematician and a farmer's wife must kill a deadly Stasi agent, and they must do it silently. Let's just think of all the things in such a kitchen. Damn! You almost don't even need to see the scene to begin salivating at the prospect of visceral delights. Added to the mix are the political backdrop of the Cold War and memories of the Holocaust. Hitchcock did the math beautifully. The old country kitchen is equipped with a gas oven. Uh, you do the math!

Given the political edge in The Drop-In and its setting, the promise of so much more is palpable. Oh, you say, "Greg, you doth protest too much. These kids clearly had a small budget and little time." To that I say: "So what?" Compromise is especially egregious in no-to-low-budget films. (I can say this with a bit of been-there-done-that as someone who never compromised as a producer no matter how low my budgets were.)

There might be some light on the horizon, though. It comes by way of my other mild disappointment in the film. About halfway through I started to get the sinking feeling that I was watching a short film designed as a "calling card" for an eventual feature film version. I can smell this with the same olfactory repugnance I feel when I hit a skunk on the highway. Sure enough, the end title credits revealed that The Drop-In was financed by a fund set up to create just such a film.

So yes, the promise is here, the talent is here, a solid idea is here and there will no doubt be one hell of a terrific feature film to eventually be made. That said, I urge the filmmakers to study Hitchcock before the next draft of their feature screenplay. One can't go wrong using The Master as a primary influence.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3-Stars

The Drop-In enjoys its World Premiere at TIFF 2017.

EUTHANIZER - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Creepy, chilly existential male angst @ TIFF 2017

Euthanasia: a dirty job, but someone's got to do it.

Euthanizer (2017)
Dir. Teemu Nikki
Starring: Matti Onnismaa, Hannamaija Nikander, Jari Virman

Review By Greg Klymkiw

So, when I first decided to see this movie, I did some simple math. I didn't read any press releases, reviews or the blurb in the TIFF 2017 programme guide. All I knew is that it was from Finland and that it was called Euthanizer. I suspected, based on these addends, that the sum might well yield a product worth seeing, but little did I realize it would bestow a picture that, by its end-title credits would have me soaring, steeped in the joy I so seldom experience these days - the sheer, buoyant jubilance that I have indeed just witnessed the very thing that made me first love movies, more than anything, in the first place.

Though Euthanizer is not a period piece, its aesthetic feels gloriously in line with the existential angst (primarily of the male persuasion) that so defined the cinema of the 70s - notably the work of Karel Reizs (The Gambler), James Toback (Fingers), Peter Yates (The Friends of Eddie Coyle), Monte Hellman (Two Lane Blacktop, Cockfighter) and pretty much anything by Werner Herzog from this nasty, tough-minded decade of cinematic perfection.

Veijo (Matti Onnismaa) is a self-employed mechanic who moonlights as a more cost-effective alternative for those needing to euthanize their pets. If the animals are small, he's rigged his car for carbon monoxide poisoning, and for larger beasts, he takes them out into the woods and shoots them in the head. When people bring him their pets, he looks deep into the eyes of the animals - it's as if he can see into their souls, hear their thoughts and feel their pain. He then admonishes the owners. He knows that they are the cause of their animals' suffering and he uncannily assesses their failings as human beings. Even those who purport to not hear Veijo know deep-down that he speaks the truth.

His own father lies paralyzed in a palliative ward, taken care of by a compassionate nurse (Hannamaija Nikander) who slowly comes to admire and even fall in love with the distant Veijo. This is a couple inextricably linked by their proximity to suffering, dying and death. They're made for each other.

One day, Veijo is visited by a loathsome racist proletarian who belongs to a right-wing, White Supremacist group called "The Sons of Finland". The racist wants Veijo to put his dog down. Veijo agrees, takes the scumbag's money, but then chooses to keep the dog alive. There is no reason to kill this dog. It's vibrant, alert and deserves to live. Veijo and the dog become as inseparable as he and the nurse are.

Alas, this is Finland. There can be no happy endings here. An act of violence shatters Veijo's life and he has only one choice. Humanity, and Veijo is nothing if not humane, is something with two extremes twixt the shades of grey.

Vengeance must be exacted, but a price will be paid.

Euthanizer is, to be sure, a film of grace. It is also deeply shocking, insanely romantic, sickeningly horrifying, bleakly/blackly funny and a work of complex layers. It provides no easy answers, no pat resolutions, but when you attempt to catch your breath upon its knockout ending, you know - beyond a shadow of a doubt - that you've seen a motion picture that's seared itself upon your soul and it's never, ever going to leave you. It'll be there forever and it's not going away - at least not until you're six feet under.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars

Euthanizer plays at TIFF 2017

WE FORGOT TO BREAK UP - Review By Greg Klymkiw - A song will be sung @TIFF2017

Surprise backstage visit yields bigger surprise.

We Forgot To Break Up (2017)
Dir. Chandler Levack
Scr. Steven McCarthy & Levack
Nvl. Kayt Burgess
Starring: Sofia Banzhaf, Cara Gee, Grace Glowicki, Steven McCarthy, Mark Rendall, Dov Tiefenbach, Jesse Todd

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Backstage within a concert venue, a young man hurriedly attempts to pen a note amidst all the accoutrements which suggest that at any point, a soon-to-be-prepping-to-perform band will be filing in. Sure enough, one by one, they do.

Each time, with each musician, the same thing happens.

At first, the young man is not recognized. Then, he is.

You see, he was, many, many years ago, familiar to all of them - more than familiar, actually, but very, very close. To one of them, he was more intimate than all the rest.

There will be a confrontation. Perhaps even a reckoning.

And there will be a song.

We Forgot To Break Up is a clever, compulsive slice of dramatic life. It builds to a third act that could have, in less skilled creative hands, seemed little more than a glorified music video with an extended preamble. As David Lynch recently proved, week after week in Season 3 of Twin Peaks, there are some final acts that ring-out musically with dramatic/thematic resonance, and do so in ways we seldom see in the movies anymore.

We Forgot To Break Up succeeds in an identical fashion.

It’s a short dramatic film adapted from a novel. Obviously this means that it’s a slice from a much larger work, but happily, the movie feels like a piece unto itself and is bereft of that whiff inherent in short calling-card-styled films meant to announce an eventual feature is round the corner. Though this might indeed be the case here (a short that could become a feature), it's not something that nags at us as the picture unspools. This, is good. So's the film.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

We Forgot To Break Up plays at TIFF 2017

mother! - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Aronofsky's Worst Movie Unleashed @TIFF2017

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THE DEATH OF STALIN - Review By Greg Klymkiw - TIFF 2017 serves up lame political satire.

Steve Buscemi delivers the performance of a lifetime.

The Death of Stalin (2017)
Dir. Armando Iannucci
Scr. Iannucci, David Schneider, Ian Martin, Peter Fellows
Nvl. Fabien Nury
Starring: Steve Buscemi, Jeffrey Tambor, Adrian Mcloughlin, Olga Kurylenko, Michael Palin, Simon Russell Beale, Paddy Considine, Andrea Riseborough, Rupert Friend, Jason Isaacs, Paul Whitehouse, Dermot Crowley

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Since he murdered 10 million of my people in Ukraine during the Holodomor, one of the most horrendous genocides of the 20th century, my pump was primed for a glorious satire about the final gasps of life from the Georgian-Russian butcher Joseph Stalin. Unfortunately, the scattershot, overwrought affair that is The Death of Stalin did so little for me as a movie, my heart sank more than a few times while it unspooled.

Not that there aren't a few laughs to be wrought from this manic look at the bushy-moustachioed scumbag-dictator during his last night on earth and the ensuing backdoor power grabs by his cabinet. Most of the guffaws come courtesy of Steve Buscemi as a malevolently wise-acre Nikita Khrushchev. This might be the performance of a lifetime - he's a hurricane-like force amidst a movie that otherwise suffers from massive tonal uncertainty.

The best satire is played dead-straight, but too often director Iannucci resorts to pitching things as "spoof" or worse, like some TV sitcom. The whole affair seems little more than Weekend at Bernie's, albeit set against the backdrop of the Kremlin in 1953 as opposed to the Hamptons in the late 80s. The film is not without some mirth at the expense of the victims of Stalin's purges - God knows why, but seeing Russians following ridiculously exhaustive death lists and summarily executing hapless "enemies of the state" elicited more than a few knee-slaps from this fella. I also loved Jeffrey Tambor's rendering of Malenkov, the ineffectually lunkheaded figurehead propped up to replace Der Russkie Führer.

Alas, the movie just proved to be exhausting. It tries too hard to be funny and when we can see those seams in the fabric we're constantly focusing on the flaws of the designer clothing hanging upon a massive markdown rack at Winner's. As such, we're indelicately wrenched out of the forward thrust. Indelicacy in a satire is just fine, but better it be inherent in the subject matter and characters rather than only within the structure of the work itself.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **½ Two-and-a-Half Stars

The Death of Stalin plays at TIFF 2017.

BORG/MCENROE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Opening Night TIFF 2017 Gala a major dud!

Good Boy/Bad Boy of Wimbledon find common ground.

Borg/McEnroe (2017)
Dir. Janus Metz
Scr. Ronnie Sandahl
Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Stellan Skarsgård, Sverrir Gudnason

Review By Greg Klymkiw

One of the greatest rivalries in professional sports remains that of 80s tennis champs Bjorn Borg (the height of Swedish civility) and John McEnroe (the nadir of American vulgarity). As such, one might expect a decent enough sports biopic inherent in the subject matter. Not so with Borg/McEnroe.

Director Janus Metz and screenwriter Ronnie Sandahl serve up this tepid misfire with one sloppy volley after another. What we get here is little more than a series of uninspired recreations of tennis matches, a whole lot of clichéd flashbacks leading up to the famed Wimbledon match and little in the way of genuine drama. So much of the movie feels like a Made-for-TV affair, but without the kind of crisp competence that might have made the movie watchable.

The tennis sequences are supremely disappointing - the lack of solid wide and/or long shots, way too many frenetic cuts and no sense of geography all adds up to a whole lot of nothing. The dramatic childhood and early adulthood flashbacks yield by-rote brush strokes of the pair and the most potentially interesting thing about them, their eventual friendship (borne out of rivalry and mutual sporting admiration) is left as a simple post-script at the picture's end.

LaBeouf continues to dazzle as an actor, relishing the opportunity to madly roil and saltily cuss his way through the proceedings. Sadly, poor Gudnason is allowed little more than stoicism as Borg ruminates upon his upcoming death-match at Wimbledon. Skarsgård is relegated to the ho-hum loyal coach perch.

Aside from the picture's near incompetence, it's a bore. That might be its greatest sin.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: * One Star

Borg/McEnroe is a Mongrel Media release at TIFF 2017.

WHAT WILL PEOPLE SAY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - TIFF 2017: Shame Yields Kidnapping

A father and daughter on the precipice.

What Will People Say (2017)
Dir. Iram Haq
Starring: Maria Mozhdah, Adil Hussain, Rohit Saraf, Ekavali Khanna

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The number of times I heard my parents utter the words: "What will people say?" is incalculable. I can't remember a time in my life when it wasn't on their lips and it was usually in reference to some real or perceived offence I committed quite naturally by my very existence and who I naturally was/am as a human being. From early childhood on, I was the living, breathing, walking, talking fuel for this question. It's even a question I heard uttered within the context of pretty much anything that occurred within their sphere of existence in which "what people would say" loomed large.

As a child and adult, it was not only a hurtful question, but even, I daresay, a stupid question. My earliest memories of not giving a shit about what people would say about anything I did or said are as acute now as they were then. I really didn't and don't give a shit what people would/will say. Not so with my parents or frankly anyone who believed that the status quo meant anything at all.

I was not, nor will I ever be a sheep led to slaughter. As such, what people will say is just so much nonsense.

I suspect it's a generational thing, but no matter how many times I heard the question, usually the result of something "shameful" I did or said, I would never have imagined being kidnapped and forced to submit to indoctrination into old world values.

This is precisely what happens to Nisha (Maria Mozhdah), the teenage daughter of hard-working immigrant Pakistanis living in Oslo, Norway. Like any modern kid in the modern world, she goes to school, hangs with friends and hits the nightclubs. Alas, the "normal" life in the western world is completely at odds with her fundamentalist family and when she innocently finds herself in a position where she egregiously flouts their values, she is kidnapped and shipped to Pakistan with an aunt and uncle charged with training her in the ways of being a dutiful daughter (and eventual wife in an arranged marriage).

At first Nisha's life in the "old world" is fraught with subjugation and drudgery, but she slowly begins to connect with her heritage. Sadly, she finds herself in a horrific situation that is not in any way, shape or form her fault, but again she finds herself in a position where she brings "shame" to her family.

And in some cultures, it is perfectly acceptable to kill a child that brings you shame.

What Will People Say proves to be an extremely promising debut feature for Oslo-born actress/art director Iram Haq. Replete with glorious cultural details and stirring family drama, Haq layers her film with a myriad of complexities beneath a solidly simple coat hanger. It is a movie as filled with joy, love and sheer humanity as it is with chilling, suspenseful tension.

At several points, the anxiety displayed is so taut that her direction is worthy of Hitchcock himself. I found myself on the edge of my seat, almost begging and pleading with the character of Nisha to open her eyes to everything that I could see happening, but of course, a great director knows that there's nothing more thrilling than when a central character knows nothing and goes with a flow that we the audience recognize as the wrong direction to take.

There are set pieces which are masterfully directed: scenes and images and the feelings they engendered, that are with me still - mysterious night rides, shocking moments of abandonment, thrilling attempts at escape, a darkness-enshrouded encounter with sexually predatory cops and in one lollapalooza of a father-daughter confrontation, a walk into the wilderness that leads to the edge of a cliff that plummets into the maw of a deadly chasm.

Yes, the Master of Suspense would approve. So do I.

And yes, we must all acknowledge that an "old world" will persist in our lives. What's so sophisticated and mature about Haq's exploration of this is that she provides a balance to the venerable qualities of tradition so that the ebbs and flows, the peaks and valleys of the dramatic action are compulsively driven by that which is clearly both right and wrong about one's heritage.

What people will say ultimately means very little compared to how one conducts oneself based upon values that are discovered and learned by always keeping one's eyes wide open, but where tradition rules the roost, sometimes we all need to prop up our eyelids with toothpicks.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars

What Will People Say screens at TIFF 2017

THE JUDGE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - TIFF 2017: To be a female Shari’a judge in Palestine

One of the wisest and bravest women in the Middle East.

The Judge (2017)
Dir. Erika Cohn

Review By Greg Klymkiw

A society can only be as progressive as its most progressive members. Just ask Kholoud Al-Faqih, the first woman to ever be appointed to the position of judge within a Shari’a court in Palestine. As a young lawyer, she dreamed of bringing an enlightened voice to the judicial system of her country and in so doing, redress the imbalances faced by women in a world fraught with chauvinism, sexism, misogyny and just-plain blinkered old world misinterpretation of Islamic Law.

Though Erika Cohn's The Judge might have benefitted somewhat by a stricter adherence to a more pure Cinéma Direct approach (at times the interviews seemed at odds with the as-it-happens footage), the film's vérité style is rigorous enough to not betray its dynamic subject, surely one of the wisest and bravest women in the Middle East.

The film follows the day-to-day activities of this champion for the rights of women in a decidedly male-centric world and we get a rare glimpse into the civil and domestic legal struggles they face almost constantly. Al-Faqih is, however, not about to take a "home team" stance in any sort of knee-jerk fashion and she dispenses her rulings so that fairness is the key element in her dealings with both women and men. As we see, in case after case, when equality is generously applied to both sexes, even within adherence to the strict tenets of Shari’a dictates, what's good for the goose is clearly good for the gander and vice versa.

As the picture proceeds, all is not sun and roses. Al-Faqih was first appointed by an extremely liberal Sheikh and when he's forced to retire, she finds her role substantially diminished. Pulled from the courtroom and into an office to deal with strictly bureaucratic matters, she faces the frustration of having to muck through the drudgery of paper-pushing whilst justice outside her four walls is back in the hands of the patriarchy.

She's a tough nut to crack, though, and she doesn't succumb to this unfair sledge hammer approach. Her struggle to regain her rightful place is the stuff of solid "drama" and we're miraculously allowed to witness the true power of evolution and advancement.

Yeah, it's a feel-good movie. Not a damn thing wrong with that.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3-Stars

The Judge screens at TIFF 2017

DISAPPEARANCE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - TIFF 2017: Sex, Death & Ice-Fishing in Norway

Disappearing in Norway.

Disappearance (2017)
Dir. Boudewijn Koole
Scr. Jolein Laarman
Starring: Rifka Lodeizen, Elsie de Brauw, Marcus Hanssen, Jakob Oftebro

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I do so enjoy entering a frigid cinematic icebox to revel in the spectacle of a parent and adult child acrimoniously slashing away at each other.

Boudewijn Koole's extraordinary film Disappearance is a magnificent new entry into this time-honoured/tested/proven tradition exemplified most notably by the chilly heartbreak of Ingmar Bergman's masterpiece of mother-daughter sniping, Autumn Sonata. Though Koole's film eschews the glorious histrionics of so many films in this genre - think Piper Laurie chastising Sissy Spacek for revealing her "dirty pillows" in Brian DePalma's Carrie or the horrid Gladys Cooper browbeating Bette Davis into a nervous breakdown in Irving Rapper's Now Voyager - Koole and screenwriter Jolein Laarman serve up plenty of roiling bitterness.

We enter the world of this film via the blazing austerity of a cool white light upon a young woman, a child it seems, as she places her diminutive, but nimble fingers upon the ivory keys of a grand piano. She launches into a soulful virtuoso performance upon the massive stage of a concert hall. Soon after, we move from the proscenium vista to the external panoramic landscape of the snow-covered plains, lakes and hills of Norway. Roos (Rifka Lodeizen) is coming home after a year of traversing the globe as a photojournalist to visit her Mother Louise (Elsie de Brauw) and younger half-brother Bengt (Marcus Hanssen).

This is a family of artists. Roos has the "eye", her middle-aged Mom (the pianist we were first introduced to in the film's opening minutes) clearly has an "ear" (though now she channels her art into teaching music) and young Bengt might have the grandest vision of this trio - he utilizes the natural sounds of water, ice, nature, heartbeats and breath to create electronic musical compositions that soar with soulful invention.

Sister and Brother have a special bond, but Mother and Daughter's relationship is stretched far too tautly - at any moment, we sense that the rubber band that is their familial conjunction will snap upon their respective grips, effecting a pain that smarts, but lasts well beyond the initial paroxysm it causes. That's probably because aching convulsions twixt Mother and Daughter have seemingly existed from that point when Roos first agitated about in the natal gelatin of Louise's womb.

At one point, Roos charges that Mom never sang lullabies to her. Louise pooh-poohs this assertion, but when her now-adult child asks her to sing for her, middle-aged Momma can't think of a single tune. During this wrenching moment, a smile crept upon my face imagining Louise launching into a rendering of one of Gustav Mahler's Kindertotenlieder. I was not afforded the literal rendering of this perverse fantasia dancing across my cerebellum, but the notion that she might have belted out one of those rousing "Songs on the Death of Children" seems (seemed) perfectly appropriate.

In so many, many ways, Koole and Laarman's astonishing film might well be a cinematic equivalent to Mahler's immortal song cycle. Death looms large in this Norwegian winter wonderland. When a stag connects with a moving vehicle and staggers off into the woods, we follow a group of locals (including a keen, rifle-toting Louise) as they hunt down the mighty beast to put it out of its misery. Later on, in post-coital bliss (in the back of a van parked against a snowy vista on a frozen lake in which they've been ice fishing - what Canadian doesn't know this activity/setting all too well?), Roos admits to her old friend and lover Johnny (Jakob Oftebro) that she is dying. Nothing beats a good round of sexual gymnastics than an après orgasm cigarette and an admission of critical illness. (Jesus, I love European cinema!)

Healing and redemption are round the corner, but they prove to be fleeting. The film makes us (and its characters) work for it. Nothing in life comes easy. So too should it be in cinema. This is a film that teases and tortures the raw nerve endings of the human condition and it constantly finds ways to take our collective breath away when we least expect it. The final third of the film had me shuddering, long, long after its final end title credit. It's with me still and makes me thankful for the life I have had and the loves I have experienced (and continue to be touched by).

Though Disappearance draws considerable parallels to Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sontata, I cannot help but think of the words spoken by dying Agnes in the Swedish Master's Cries and Whispers:

"Come what may, this is happiness. I cannot wish for anything better. Now, for a few minutes, I can experience perfection and I feel profoundly grateful to my life, which gives me so much."

No arguments from this fella'.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars

Disappearance is screening at TIFF 2017

THE CRESCENT - Review By Greg Klymkiw - TIFF 2017: Lewtonesque Horror in Nova Scotia

Grief shared by a mother and son.

The Crescent (2017)
Dir. Seth A. Smith
Scr. Seth A. Smith, Darcy Spidle
Starring: Danika Vandersteen, Woodrow Graves, Andrew Gillis

Review By Greg Klymkiw

More often than not we choose to confront numbing grief with escape. Facing bereavement head-on is said to be the best way of dealing with the debilitation that loss inspires, but we're all only human after all and it's just so much easier to run away and repress. (And believe you me, repression is not always without merit.)

Beth (Danika Vandersteen) is a beautiful young (recent) widow who hightails it to a remote house at Silver Crescent Beach (outside of Halifax) with her 2-year-old child Lowen (Woodrow Graves, real-life son of producer Nancy Urich and director Seth Smith). They find themselves in a huge, stylishly imposing domicile overlooking the roiling seas of the Atlantic Ocean and live out a quiet existence of walking the beach, playing together and for Beth, a brilliant talented visual artist, losing herself in the creation of gorgeously disturbing pieces generated through the abstract printing process of paper marbling.

From time to time, there are a few residents they encounter. On the surface, these denizens of the remote environs appear relatively benevolent, but given the film's increasingly mounting creepiness and the simple fact that it's a horror film, it doesn't take a Rhodes Scholar to figure out that they might not be who, or rather, what they appear to be.

As the events unfurl in a meticulous slow-burn pace, with plenty of cerebral mind-blowing explosions of visual fireworks, director Smith eventually unleashes all-out, drawer-filling scares and in one delicious set piece, the kind of sickening visceral splatter that horror aficionados will love. It's always lovely seeing a quiet, intelligent horror film that channels the energies and artistry of RKO's master of atmospheric chills Val Lewton (The Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, The Seventh Victim, The Body Snatcher).

If anything, the Lewton picture The Crescent most resembles in terms of both horror and deep emotional resonance is the Robert Wise-Gunther von Fritsch collaboration The Curse of the Cat People. Sometimes there's just nothing scarier and more disturbing than a child's loneliness and grief. And, of course, a Mother's. Lewton knew and pioneered the notion that horror was what we all faced in our daily lives. The Crescent picks up this torch very nicely indeed. Darcy Spidle and Smith generate a terrific screenplay. Writing "visually" is the greatest challenge contemporary scripts face and it's a joy to experience such purely cinematic writing that adheres to the needs of narrative beats and character, but does so with a kino-eye.

The performances in the film are all blessed with the kind of naturalism that is refreshing (artist Vandersteen in her motion picture debut is radiant, the camera loves her), but in particular, toddler Groves steals the show with a child performance to rival that of the extraordinary Victoire Thivisol in Jacques Doillon's Ponette and the astonishing Brigitte Fossey in René Clément's Jeux Interdits, both classic films dealing with childhood perspectives upon grief, to which The Crescent can proudly keep company with, but with, blood - and when it comes, plenty o' crimson ooze.

THE FILM CORNER REVIEW: **** Four Stars

The Crescent screens at TIFF 2017. If this film is any indication of what we can expect from new TIFF Midnight Madness programmer Peter Kuplowsky in this, his inaugural solo year, I suspect we have a very worthy successor to former longtime MM toppers Colin Geddes and Noah Cowan.

LOTS OF KIDS, A MONKEY AND A CASTLE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - TIFF 2017: Wealth Lost

Julita and her monkey: a dream come true.

Lots of Kids, a Monkey and a Castle (2017)
Dir. Gustavo Salmerón

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Julita had a dream. As a young woman, her fairytale needs were simple. She wanted a whole passel of kids, a monkey and a castle.

She got them all.

Julita was always a pack rat, so when she inherited a castle from a wealthy uncle, there was finally a place big enough for the middle-class seventy-something woman to store her vast accumulations. The castle, of course, came with its own fair share of clutter; as it turns out, centuries worth of arcane impedimenta.

When Julita mentions to her son (director Gustavo Salmerón, also a Spanish actor of note) that somewhere amidst the debris there exist two vertebrae belonging to his great grandmother (who died tragically during the Spanish Civil War), the picture has a strangely irresistible element to drive it forward. Salmerón had already started shooting this personal documentary about his vivacious Mom (it was shot over the course of a decade) and this happily gave him (and his film) plenty of time to become obsessed with locating this curious family heirloom.

Luckily, for the movie (and the audience's edification/entertainment value), but not so lucky for Julita and her quiet, unassuming husband, the financial crisis hit Spain and much of the documentary charts the mad rush to pack and move all the belongings in the castle which will be lost to whopping back taxes. With help from her six children and Julita's complete lack of organizational abilities, the film charts both the massive job of packing and shipping, but also the search for the elusive vertebrae.

Along the way we're treated to this mad passionate woman's relationships with her family and we get the alternately perky and melancholy tale of, yes, the monkey.

Personal family documentaries can prove to be a mixed bag. Depending upon the subject matter, they can be deadly. Salmerón was canny enough to know his Mom was an ideal subject for a movie, in spite of her on-camera protestations that nobody would be interested in watching an entire film about her. The dutiful son (and filmmaker) proves his Mother wrong on that point. Not only is she endlessly, eminently compelling, but the social/political backdrop of class and economic catastrophe proves to be an unbeatable combination. The amount of footage Salmerón must have had to contend with is skillfully edited and yields a jaunty, funny, incisive and poignant portrait.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3-Stars

Lots of Kids, a Monkey and a Castle screens at TIFF 2017