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Ballroom Dancer (ds. Christian Bonke and Andreas Koefoed)
Early in Christian Bonke and Andreas Koefoed’s Ballroom Dancer, we see 33-year-old Russian ballroom dancing champion Slavik tell his students that a dance between two people is an everyday story, not a...
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Bones Brigade: An Autobiography (d. Stacy Peralta)
Stacy Peralta returns to skateboarding culture with mixed results in Bones Brigade: An Autobiography. A sort of sequel to Dogtown and Z-Boys, which focused on his mates in early 1970s crew Zephyr,...
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The Mystery of Mazo de la Roche (d. Maya Gallus)
Newmarket-born author Mazo de la Roche hit the big leagues in 1927 when her third novel Jalna, the first entry in a lucrative sixteen-part series, won a $10 000 award from the ATLANTIC MONTHLY. In...
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Wildness (d. Wu Tsang)
“They call me Silver Platter.” That's the opening salvo of Wu Tsang’s Wildness, which hands its narrating duties off to the so-named bar in the East end of Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park, a safe space...
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Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (d. Alison Klayman)
Like Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb’s vital This is Not a Film, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorrydelights in capturing its dissident subject lounging in the company of animals. Panahi has his iguana, which...
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The Boxing Girls of Kabul (d. Ariel Nasr)
Ariel Nasr’s The Boxing Girls of Kabulopens with clandestine footage of an execution in Kabul’s Olympic Stadium, where members of the Taliban force a woman to crawl before shooting her at close-range....
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She Said Boom: The Story of Fifth Column (d. Kevin Hegge)
A few minutes into Kevin Hegge’s long-gestating She Said Boom: The Story of Fifth Column, a critic calls the titular feminist post-punk act an art band that wasn’t necessarily arty. That sounds like an...
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Legend of a Warrior (d. Corey Lee)
Director Corey Lee stages a moving reunion with his infamous but distant father in Legend of a Warrior. As a martial arts grandmaster and lauded trainer famed for ushering former pupil Billy Chau to a...
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Tchoupitoulas (ds. Bill and Turner Ross)
Tchoupitoulas is a rare thing, an aesthetic antidote to the info-dump documentary tradition of talking head interviews and old snapshots. Described in the press notes as a night-time “piggyback ride”...
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Finding North (ds. Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson)
An incendiary political missive in search of a good movie, Finding North is as frustrating as it is revelatory. Directors Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson come at the problem of hunger in the United...
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Who Cares? (d. Rosie Dransfeld)
A vérité portrait of a group of sex workers in Edmonton, Rosie Dransfeld’s Who Cares? is a sobering and uncondescending look at vulnerable people who work without a safety net on the outskirts of...
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Shut Up and Play the Hits (ds. Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern)
“It’s like a sad hipster DJ Revolutionary Road.” That’s recently-retired LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy on first single “Losing My Edge” in Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern’s by turns ebullient...
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The Frog Princes (ds. Omar Majeed and Ryan Mullins)
The Frog Princes is so big-hearted you wish it had more to say than “way to go.” Copping its framing device from Rushmore, the film shadows a theatre troupe over a few months as it prepares for its...
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¡Vivan Las Antipodas! (d. Victor Kossakovsky)
“The world spins, but they’re always below us.” That’s one of the many pearls in Victor Kossakovsky’s ¡Vivan Las Antipodas!, a high-concept travelogue that fleetly covers four pairs of dry-land spots...
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Only the Young (ds. Elizabeth Mims and Jason Tippet)
Like a delicate magic trick, Only the Youngis best watched in a state of rapt fascination. An unostentatious feature debut from Elizabeth Mims and Jason Tippet, the film chronicles a few months in the...
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Summer of Giacomo (d. Alessandro Comodin)
Conceptually sandwiched somewhere between Maren Ade’s terrific Everyone Else and Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Alessandro Comodin’s SummerofGiacomo is a richly textured portrait of dumb love in the...
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The World Before Her (d. Nisha Pahuja)
The winner of Hot Docs’ Best Canadian Feature award, granted just two weeks after it snagged top doc honours at Tribeca, Nisha Pahuja’s The World Before Her is a fearless and intricately structured...
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Loose ends
The Betrayal (d. Karen Winther): The director returns to her spotty history in this intermittently affecting but mostly flat exercise. Winther combs through old journals and interviews both her parents...
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