I went to see the latest Monday Mystery Movie, but within less than a minute, I realized that I had already seen it. It was I Swear, which I may or may not have watched online months ago, but is just now getting a theatrical release in Canada. I quickly hurried out to see what else was starting and became excited when I saw Speed Racer next door in IMAX.

Look, I'm not going to try to convince the haters…

Rewatching The Departed reinforces how rare it is for a film this big, this stacked, and this ambitious to fire on every single cylinder. It’s the kind of film that feels effortless while you’re watching it, even though you can tell every piece had to click perfectly for it to work. Drawing from the DNA of classic crime films while injecting a modern edge, it’s still one of the most gripping, rewatchable entries in Martin Scorsese’s filmography. It's going to…

After watching Obsession, I was curious enough about director Curry Barker to seek out some of his earlier work, and Enigma seemed as good as any other starting point. The brisk runtime turns out to be exactly the right amount of time to explore what it's doing, and it's a tighter, more focused piece of work than a feature-length treatment of the same concept would have produced.

The central idea is a strong one, and Barker makes good use of…

I knew very little about the Backrooms mythology going into this. I'd seen the trailer, but I had no familiarity with the lore and I hadn't ever watched the YouTube series that originally established the concept. Instead, I latched on to the growing excitement around films like this one and Obsession that have made it thrilling to watch small, inventive directors build something extraordinary on a microbudget. Backrooms ended up being exactly that kind of experience and more.

As I've…

When Blue Valentine was released in 2010, I was 21 years old. I lacked any substantial relationship experience or life experience, but that didn’t mean that director Derek Cianfrance’s work was any less effective for me. I found it to be an absolutely devastating film back then, and that perception hasn’t changed. However, my opinion about Dean and Cindy’s relationship dynamic has shifted dramatically. Even though my watchlist for new films grows larger every single day, sometimes there’s value in…

I've never been easily scared by horror films. It probably has something to do with my older brother Zack putting on The Exorcist when I was six years old while my parents were oblivious in the other room. Even films like Hereditary and Sinister have mostly made me feel uneasy rather than truly spooked. Horror is one of my favourite genres, but genuine fear is rare. Obsession actually managed to get to me. More than once. I saw it on…