'Viral': Film Review | Hot Docs 2021

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentAfter 10 consecutive days of violence, the renewed Israeli-Palestinian conflict is already considered the worst clash since 2014. For a film community known to be fiercely opposed to the politics led by Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, both Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers and producers fear the escalation of violence will cause irreparable damage.

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

The first thing you need to know about Daniel Sivan's feature documentary Dirty Tricks, premiering as part of the Hot Docs festival, is that the title is a pun. You see, it's about a cheating scandal in the world of elite bridge and, of course, a "trick" is the standard competitive unit in the game — as it is in hearts, spades and euchre.

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.