Ever since
The Invisible Man, the upper-class wife whose luxury real estate becomes an overbearing metaphor for her isolating marriage seems to have become a go-to set-up for indie filmmakers. Last year we had
Swallow and
The Nest, and this year that plot gets a straight-up genre treatment in
Held. The perennially pained-looking Emma (Jill Awbrey, who also wrote the script) is clearly over her square-jawed husband Henry (Bart Johnson), but they’re giving it one more try by escaping to a secluded, automated smart house vacation rental. Naturally, the property’s version of Alexa has other plans drugging them and forcing them into chivalrous machinations straight out of a 1950s marriage manual. Held doesn’t hold back, skimping on character development, rushing into the concept and mainly using the first act to set things up to pay off later. Basic druggy montages, a visually uninteresting set and an even more uninspired baddie sap
Subscribe Voyagers Colin Farrell, Tye Sheridan, Lily-Rose Depp; directed by Neil Burger
Neil Burger s sci-fi space odyssey is an allegory of existential journey into the unknown, persistently raising questions about mankind s destiny, purpose and uniqueness coupled with a longstanding quandary about distance versus time.
Set in 2063, the film opens with Earth increasingly uninhabitable, thereby springing great minds into action to explore life beyond the stars. Alas! They ve discovered a planet for the intergalactic migration; however, it would take 86 years to get there. Their off-kilter solution? Send a group of wunderkind children, who were conceived with in vitro fertilization and nurtured in isolation with simply the crème de la crème of everything in life.
What’s new on VOD and streaming this weekend: April 9-11
Including Nomadland, Sugar Daddy, The Nevers, Held and Exterminate All The Brutes By Kevin Ritchie and Norman Wilner
Apr 9, 2021
N
OW critics pick what’s new to streaming and VOD for the weekend of April 9. Plus: Everything new to VOD and streaming platforms.
Sugar Daddy
(Wendy Morgan)
NOW named Kelly McCormack one of Canada’s rising screen stars in 2019. Watch Sugar Daddy and you’ll see why: Morgan’s slightly stylized, emotionally charged drama stars the Letterkenny and Killjoys scene-stealer – most recently seen as an unwelcome guest in Ginny & Georgia – as a struggling musician who joins an agency that provides “paid dinner companions” to older men who don’t want emotional attachments, or anything further. Naturally, the reality of it turns out to be a little more complicated. McCormack wrote and produced the film, and does her own singing, but Sugar Daddy’s not just a showcase for her
Canada s oldest festival of new stage work has taken an unlikely pandemic pivot: it s become a book
The Rhubarb Festival has become a book with single print run of 888 copies and no two are the same.
Social Sharing
The Rhubarb Festival has become a book with single print run of 888 copies and no two are the same
Posted: Feb 10, 2021 1:30 PM ET | Last Updated: February 10
The Rhubarb book, designed by Monnet Design.(Buddies in Bad Times)
Queeries is a weekly column by CBC Arts producer Peter Knegt that queries LGBTQ art, culture and/or identity through a personal lens.
When it came time to decide how The Rhubarb Festival Canada s longest-running festival of new stage work would turn 42 years old in the middle of a pandemic, the festival s director Clayton Lee was faced with an intersection of dilemmas some more unexpected than others.