Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder and Jenna Ortega star in Time Burton’s worthy, worthwhile sequel.
Benedict Wall, Florence Noble, Jessica Grace Smith, Michelle Ang, Shadon Meredith, Jonny Brugh, Cameron Rhodes, Chloe White, and Lucky Lee Morton star.
The Toronto International Film Festival, now in its 49th year, was called the Festival of Festivals prior to just being shortened down to its four letter acronym, TIFF. The festival still is adhering to its original mandate of screening the best of the year’s festival circuit entries (Sundance, Cannes, Berlin, and so forth) while also acting as a late summer Hollywood awards-buzz launch, a showcase for Canada’s domestic production, and more than a little bit of celebrity-gazing north of the US border. With nearly 300 feature films, and a host of industry events and parties within its 10 day window starting on September 5, 2024, there are several ‘types of festival’ overlapping each other, and many ways to focus things down to…
Quebec filmmaker Pascal Plante, known for Fake Tattoos and the critically hailed Nadia, Butterfly, shifts his creative gaze to darker territories in his latest offering, Red Rooms, which provides an intriguing spin on the ubiquitous serial killer genre. The story orbits around tech-savvy Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), a seemingly successful woman with a semi-professional modeling career and a knack for online poker. Yet, her societal image is marred by her unwavering fascination with serial killer Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), aka the Demon of Rosemont. Kelly-Anne’s obsession appears to verge on pathological, as she attends his court proceedings with keen interest. The film introduces Chevalier not as an active player but a fringe element, his gruesome deeds serving as the narrative fulcrum. Kelly-Anne has become a serial…
In part 1 of our interview, Red Rooms filmmaker Pascal Plante talked extensively about how individual scenes were designed and shot. In part 2, we got more into the musical score and the ethics of making his thriller. Red Rooms opens Friday in limited release via Utopia. You were just talking about the opening where she [Kelly-Anne played by Juliette Gariépy] wakes up. Part of what immediately drew me in is the score, that incredible classical piece that Dominique [Plante] wrote. And I was curious, did you two talk about sort of the genres and the types of music that he would create beforehand, or did he come up with all of that and then bring it to you? Because it goes from classical to…
IFC Films, Shudder and RLJE Films – the holy genre trinity from AMC Networks – have collectively announced their slate of theatrical and streaming releases over the next four months. In a couple weeks IFC is re-releasing Jennifer Kent’s terrific debut feature film, The Babadook, on its tenth anniversary. Festival fave from SXSW and Fantasia Azrael is coming at the end of the month. We’ll also get back to back months of Nick Frost horror flicks with Black Cab in November and Get Away in December. The gallery below is far more interesting than the concise list that follows. It has trailers where available. THE BABADOOK – In Theaters Starting September 19 10 Year Anniversary Re-Release Written and Directed by Jennifer Kent…
With the final long weekend of the Summer but a recent memory our attention now turns towards the start of school years, a return to normal routines, and the impending celebration of spooky season. As a primer check out Screambox’s streaming line-up for the month of September. Programming kicks off tomorrow with the arrival of the Gen Z slasher, #AMFAD All My Friends Are Dead. The slasher flick had its premiere at Tirbeca where if failed to win over our own Josh. Still, the best line in his review was, “Unfortunately, as I’ve aged beyond my twenties, I have been cursed with the dumb desire for the most miniscule amount of logical connective tissue between the kills and that’s where #AMFAD leaves too much…
Sheryl Lee returns to the scene of the crime, attending an anniversary screening of David Lynch’s ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me’ at the site of its 1992 hometown premiere.
In Martin Kudlac’s review of Red Rooms, he writes about how the film draws on Michael Haneke, its “enigmatic” protagonist Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), and the ways it repeatedly “bucks genre expectations” as a film ostensibly about a serial killer. More than a year later — the film has had a long road to US distribution — I was lucky enough to sit down with Plante and ask him about all these aspects Martin discusses in his review and more. In stark distinction to the sometimes cold, sometimes brutal film, Plante is one of the kindest and most affable filmmakers I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with. Albeit, it certainly helps the conversation that we have similar music taste and feelings about the difference between horror…
We’ve safely crossed into September! That means it’s Halloween season at the movies. To celebrate, Popcorn Frights’ Wicked Weekend 2024 will thrill horror-movie lovers with its “annual celebration of all the eerie, weird, wild, and strange things that go bump in the night!” That quotation comes from the official release, which is so good that I can’t help but copy and paste their official description: “The event, running September 25-29 at the historic Gateway Theater, will feature eight film premieres and special presentations highlighted by new nightmares featuring some of the most beloved women in genre cinema, including Sarah Paulson, Samara Weaving, Heather Langenkamp, Barbara Crampton, Julia Garner, and Oscar-winner Ariana DeBose.” Which films, you might ask? As spotlighted in our headline, Apartment 7A, a…