2 Best Releases Starring Rebecca Liddiard

Atom Egoyan's latest doesn't hide from academic sincerity. In the 2010s, Atom Egoyan fell by the wayside in my ‘auteurs to keep an eye on’ radar rather rapidly. The last film I saw from him, The Captive, starring Ryan Reynolds, proved such an impenetrable slog that I couldn’t go back to him for a while. I remember The Sweet Hereafter and Exocita being formative films of my adolescence. I count them among the first to push the boundaries of what cinema ‘was’ to me. The former, especially, had such a hypnotic visual and audial style tied to such a potent mythic metaphor – The Pied Piper of Hamelin – that I couldn’t stop thinking about it for long after.  I’m therefore happy to say that Egoyan’s latest film, Seven Veils, elicited a similar feeling. It’s a movie that has been on my mind nearly every day since seeing it at TIFF.  Continue Reading →

Ricky Tollman's directorial debut has great ingredients, but they add up to a terrible stew. Run This Town is an admirable first effort from writer/director Ricky Tollman. Unfortunately, the worse aspects of the film keep it from truly shining. While the film soars in certain performances and technical aspects, a weak script and a lead actor devoid of any charisma prevent this film from rising to the level of the journalism thrillers it is so clearly modeled after.  The film is set in 2013 Toronto, during the much-publicized last year in office of hard-partying mayor Rob Ford, played in a captivating, transformative performance by Damien Lewis. Much to the detriment of the film, Ford is only present in a few tense scenes, when the film truly feels like it’s making a statement. The focus of the film flips between the support staff trying to cover up Ford’s partying and the journalists chasing after the much-publicized video of Ford with a crack pipe in his hand that made its way around the internet in early 2014.  It’s in the cast of journalists that the film’s biggest failure is present, particularly Ben Platt’s performance as journalist Bram, who fights to get his story about Ford smoking crack past his editors David (Scott Speedman) and Judith (Jennifer Ehle). While Ehle and Speedman are fantastic as the kind of editors that any journalist would both hate to work for and also chase their approval, Platt fails to make Bram anything more than a whiny young man who lucked into the perfect story. Continue Reading →