Directed by Ana Lily Amirpour • 2014 • 99 min • in Farsi with English subtitles

Set in a fictional Iranian city, shot in California, and featuring a budding romance between a modern-day James Dean and a vampire, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is fresh and clever mash-up of genres and cultures. In her director’s statement, Ana Lily Amirpour points to the film’s indebtedness to Sergio Leone, David Lynch, Nosferatu, Die Antwoord, and more. An eclectic mix, no doubt, these give a sense of the film’s surprisingly compatible range of referents.

Arash (Arash Marandi) lives in Bad City, looking after his burdensome father Hossein (Marshall Manesh). The proud owner of a flashy, classic sports car, Arash has to work long hours at a five-star hotel to afford his image of wealth. His hopeful ambitions and lower-class lifestyle are at odds and in sharp focus at the outset. When his prized...

In “Avatar as Technological Tentpole,” Charles Acland uses the marketing of James Cameron’s 2009 sci-fi adventure to suggest that film viewers exhibit platform consciousness, or an appreciation for the differences between a film’s exhibition formats. He also explores the ways in which Avatar was touted as a benchmark film due to its innovative use of digital 3D exhibition. With sequels on the horizon, a full-blown trilogy of follow-ups due to begin their roll-out in December of 2017 (Lang), these ideas are well worth revisiting.

Acland points to some similarities between Avatar’s purported technological newness and the film’s narrative, identifying self-reflexivity in the myriad pieces of new technology within Avatar’s diegesis. I wish to elaborate on this point and remark that Avatar goes far beyond this in thematizing its own claim of enhanced cinematic immersion via 3D, while also...

Directed by Chad Stahelski • 2014 • 101 min

There is something to be said for efficiency in action filmmaking. In a genre that relies primarily on pace and tone, it’s easy to fall into the trap of overwrought love stories, convoluted premises, or interpersonal melodrama in a bid at artistic legitimacy. Films often suffer for it. In John Wick, stunt-coordinator Chad Stahelski’s directorial debut, these tropes are invoked, but only in the most superficial, self-aware, efficient ways possible. They provide a cleverly stripped down framework for one of the best action films to come out of Hollywood in years.

When retired hit-man John Wick’s (Keanu Reeves) wife (Bridget Moynahan) dies, she leaves behind a gift to help him grieve. On the night of her funeral, a package arrives: a puppy and a love note. Hopeful, John gets back into his routine, his affection for the dog rising quickly...

Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu • 2014 • 119 min

At first glance, Birdman seems to offer a self-aware, stylish example of art imitating life, with Michael Keaton as a fictional version of himself, trying to shed the spectre of a Batman stand-in from his earlier career. In reality, this is one small piece of a brilliantly nuanced exploration of celebrity, Hollywood, media, and art.

Looking to distance himself from his internationally popular (and lucrative) Birdman persona, Hollywood actor Riggan Thomson (Keaton), writes, directs, and stars in a Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. The play, Riggan hopes, will give his career meaning, validating his fame through a more meaningful engagement with his craft - one not measured in box-office revenue. Managing a strained relationship with his daughter (Emma Stone) while butting heads...

Directed by Francis Lawrence • 2014 • 123 min

Last year, Catching Fire expanded the political implications of The Hunger Games, building a more complex fictional world than that glimpsed in the series’ first film. The murderous competition that Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) had been forced into was given more context. The sacrifice of two children from each district was drastic enough to demonstrate the ruthlessness of the government of Panem and President Snow (Donald Sutherland), but minor enough for fear to dictate inaction against a repressive regime. This fear ensured a status quo that was becoming ever more tangible, accessible to us in the audience. And the psychological toll of competing in such a nightmare was visible in Katniss’s own violent dreams and overall signs of PTSD. The series was showing signs of growing up.

In Mockingjay - Part 1, We abandon the games altogether...

• Spoiler Alert Please be advised that this article contains detailed descriptions of certain pivotal plot points in the series House of Cards.

When House of Cards premiered on Netflix in February 2013, it was met with praise and excitement. Perhaps its loudest champions were the TV critics thrilled to see the birth of a new model, an alternative to television broadcast.

How was Cards new and different from other shows? One big and evident change to the status quo was that the series didn’t really premiere at all. Rather, its first season was made available in its entirety on February 1st via the streaming site. In a Forbes article, Greg Satell suggested that House of Cards was “the first major TV show to completely bypass the usual television ecosystem of networks and cable operators” … “The game has changed,” Satell told us. And to some extent it had. Where the VCR, DVD boxed...

Directed by Kelly Reichardt • 2013 • 112 min

Kelly Reichardt’s newest film tackles environmentalism from the perspective of three American eco-terrorists. But it is less about the ethics of violence and the effectiveness of activism than it is a character study of one young man’s motivations and the aftermath of his actions. Building slowly, the film is a meditative portrait of American environmentalism, basking in the heterogeneity of the movement/community, refusing to pigeonhole its members. Even its central focus, three individuals seemingly unified by their shared crime, fractures quickly in the aftermath of their actions.

Night Moves opens with Josh (Jesse Eisenberg) and Dena (Dakota Fanning), travelling across Oregon to meet up with Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard), a disgruntled former Marine. Josh is the central orchestrator of their plan to bomb a hydroelectric dam, but it is...

Directed by James Gunn • 2014 • 121 min

Since Iron Man, Marvel Studios has been building an impressive cinematic universe with a growing number of superhero films, already brought together for The Avengers and its upcoming sequel. The complexity of the Marvel universe is not limited to the big screen, as demonstrated by ABC’s Agents of Shield and the DVD-only Marvel “One-Shots.” And in 2013, Marvel Entertainment announced that it would be releasing four new series and a miniseries exclusively to Netflix in 2015, starting with the rebooted Daredevil.

With these deliberate, calculated moves to tie all Marvel properties together, Guardians of the Galaxy is something of an oddity. While the mysterious Thanos returns, having first appeared in The Avengers, there is little here to remind us that we are in a universe shared with Thor, Black Widow, and Captain America. Guardians stands...

Directed by Ann Hui • 2014 • 178 Min • in Mandarin with English subtitles

After playing at Cannes and the Venice International Film Festival, Ann Hui’s The Golden Era thankfully gets a North American premiere courtesy of the Toronto International Film Festival. In Hui’s tragic tale, the life and career of acclaimed Chinese poet and novelist Xiao Hong (played by Tang Wei) are presented through a reflexive style that provides both a clear narrative and a challenge to the edict that an individual’s life and experience can ever be truly known (or shown).

In the mid-twentieth century, Xiao Hong leaves home to escape an oppressive family life and looming arranged marriage. Shunned for her sexual indiscretions and unexpected pregnancy, she struggles further when a lover leaves her stranded in their hotel room, unable to pay an outrageous bill. Threatened with being sold to a brothel to pay...