'Dirty Tricks': Film Review | Hot Docs 2021

This review was initially published after the 2019 Venice Film Festival premiere of “The Perfect Candidate.”As someone with a side gig on the programming team of an LGBT film festival, I’ve noticed that, while the coming-out drama is often tired and clichéd coming from American filmmakers, it can be thrilling when one is produced a part of the world (Bermuda or South Korea, for instance) where an honest conversation about queer lives is in its early stages.It’s not a put-down, then, when I say

To appreciate the roving, sometimes gauche nature of Viral, a new documentary following seven YouTube vloggers in 2020, one must consider its experimental form. Premiering at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, the film, directed by Udi Nir and Sagi Bornstein, is entirely composed of YouTube videos.

Since the shock and gore of his 2003 breakoutHigh Tensionushered him into the Splat Pack, Alexandre Aja has taken an entertaining detour with rip-roaring excursions into creature horror, in the self-explanatory Piranha 3D and the gators-in-a-hurricane disaster movie, Crawl. The French genre specialist abandons that gleefully schlocky B-movie throwback spirit but not the taut storytelling skills in Oxygen, a claustrophobic sci-fi thriller driven by Mélanie Laurent's gripping performance.

Three young Dubliners find their post-graduation confusion worsened by a nearby tragedy in Here Are the Young Men, an adaptation of Rob Doyle's debut novel directed by model-turned-actor Eoin Macken. Benefitting from a relatively high-profile cast (especially Queen's Gambit star Anya Taylor-Joy, though she's not the focus here), the picture has enough polish to draw a small audience.

After all the accusations, conspiracy theories and general misinformation regarding the origins of the coronavirus in China, the sensitive, humanistic Wuhan Wuhan does a fine job depoliticizing the topic. It shows how the Chinese response to the virus outbreak was very similar to those in hospitals around the world, though its interest for viewers, perhaps, lies in ferreting out some of the minor differences.

A muddled execution undercuts laudable ambitions in the latest effort from director William Brent Bell, who previously demonstrated his talent for turning low-budget horror films into major commercial hits with such movies as The Devil Inside and The Boy. The filmmaker mines deeper emotional terrain than usual with Separation, which attempts to inject scares into a Kramer vs.

You know you're in the realm of the archetype when a movie's closing credits favor descriptors over character names: The Waitress, The Loner, The Mentor — and, first and foremost, The Virtuoso's nameless title mercenary. Played by Anson Mount in a tight-jawed register, he's a killer for hire whose armor is starting to crack, ever so slightly, after a hit gone wrong.

Far from the consistent critical glory of Sundance contemporaries like Kelly Reichardt and Debra Granik — or even the sporadic critical glory of a Lisa Cholodenko or an Ira Sachs — and not to be confused with more marketable writing-directing duo Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini have forged one of the most perplexing career paths in American independent film.

If you're going to build a new character-driven action franchise — and hang tight for a coda sequence midway through the end credits to see how that would take shape — then you need a charismatic lead to lay the foundations. Tom Clancy's Without Remorse certainly has that in Michael B.