Reviews - Page 117

Giving you our points of view on the latest docs in release and on the circuit.

Review: ‘Maker of Monsters’

Maker of Monsters: The Extraordinary Life of Beau Dick (Canada, 91 min.) Dir. LaTiesha Ti’si’tla Fazakas, Natalie Boll   Beau Dick makes one heck of a mask, but he doesn’t wear one. The late Kwakwaka’wakw carver speaks plainly and truthfully in the documentary Maker of Monsters: The Extraordinary Life of Beau Dick and, for a man celebrated for beautiful wooden masks, Dick refuses to hide. This portrait of the late artist and activist from Alert Bay, British Columbia, honours the legacy of a man who inspired his people to wear their faces with pride. The doc situates Dick’s life and

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Review: ‘Catwalk: Tales from the Catshow Circuit’

Catwalk: Tales from the Catshow Circuit (Canada, 77 min.) Dir. Michael McNamara, Aaron Hancox   Is there any animal better suited to documentary than the cat? From the poetic felines of Chris Marker films to the box-playing furballs of Maru videos to the feral tabbies of Kedi, cats leave their paw prints of every generation of non-fiction filmmaking. The cats now make their mark on Canadian cinema with the wonderful documentary Catwalk: Tales from the Catshow Circuit. Directors Michael McNamara and Aaron Hancox spotlight the affinity owners feel for their felines and vice versa. Cats just have a novel personality

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Review: ‘Love, Cecil’

  Love, Cecil (USA, 99 min.) Dir. Lisa Immordino Vreeland Nar: Rupert Everett Feat: Cecil Beaton Roy Strong, Leslie Caron, David Hockney, David Bailey, Penelope Tree, Hamish Bowles, Isaac Mizrahi   Cecil Beaton was a wildly gifted English artist, who had a much-lauded career for over five decades. Although he’s mostly known as the Oscar-winning production and costume designer for My Fair Lady, the vast majority of Beaton’s life was spent as a photographer. And, it must be noted, his photography moved from iconic portrait work to brilliant fashion shoots to deeply moving documentary work. He was also greatly admired

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Review: ‘A Kid from Somewhere’

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A Kid from Somewhere (Canada, 54 min.) Dir. Adam Beck and Paul Johnson   It’s nice to see images of Millennials that go beyond entitled avocado toast eating brats. A Kid from Somewhere follows three young creatives as they make their mark on the world and defy convention. The film encourages youths to escape their over-parented shackles. Bumps and scratches are all part of growing up. The three subjects in A Kid from Somewhere are succeeding without training wheels. However, they consistently reassert their merits to industry veterans and, ultimately, themselves. 23-year-old photographer Olivia Bee still reassures clients who doubt

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Review: ‘Seeing Allred’

Seeing Allred (USA, 96 min.) Dir. Sophie Sartain, Roberta Grossman   “I don’t think Gloria is in a popularity contest because if she is, she lost that one,” says lawyer and commentator Greta Van Susteren in the new Netflix documentary Seeing Allred. Van Susteren laughs about the no-nonsense attitude of civil rights lawyer Gloria Allred as this documentary by Sophie Sartain and Roberta Grossman offers a highlight reel of Allred’s image on television throughout the decades. The montage includes a South Park spoof and an impersonation on The Simpsons that introduces her as a “shrill feminist lawyer.” Seeing Allred unabashedly

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Review: ‘Fake Blood’

Fake Blood (Canada, 81 min.) Dir. Rob Grant, Writ. Rob Grant, Mike Kovac   If there are two forms of filmmaking that go hand-in-hand with low budgets, they’re documentary and B-horror. Director Rob Grant and actor/writer Mike Kovac have ample experience with the latter having made oodles of horror flicks in Canada’s underground scene. Screaming girls, squishy guts, and squirm-inducing gore are all staples of their filmography, which includes B-movies like Mon Ami and Yesterday. A pretense to realism, however, is not something to which they aspire with their splat-n-chuckle violence. Their latest film Fake Blood is an experiment in

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Review: ‘Icarus’

carus (USA, 121 min.) Dir. Bryan Fogel, Writ. Bryan Fogel, Mark Monroe, Jon Bertain, Timothy Rode   Super Size Me meets Citizenfour in the mind-boggling and suspenseful doc Icarus. Bryan Fogel’s worthy Oscar nominee for Best Documentary Feature begins as a personal challenge and morphs into an international scandal. The film is an alarming whistleblower tale that raises significant concerns on the integrity of the Olympics. Following the revelations of doping by Russia’s national team, the nomination is very timely since any win in the Winter Games in Pyeongchang invites skepticism. The revelations in Icarus are so extensive, elaborate, and

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