WEEKENDER | Brewery and the Beast Vancouver 2024

False Creek—(June 2, 2024) Inauspiciously moved up a month from its usual midsummer date, the eleventh annual Brewery and the Beast Vancouver, one of Canada's ultimate all-you-can-eat-and-drink outdoor meat and craft beer festivals, packed another hungry hoard of rainjacket-clad barbecue lovers at Concord Pacific Place on a very wet and rainy weekend.

SCREEN | Faking It – Glen Powell Takes the 'Hit Man'

"I guess I'm just your fantasy."

Netflix / VVS Films

Austin filmmaker Richard Linklater reteams with his Everybody Wants Some!! star Glen Powell (also a co-writer/producer) to glamourize journalist and Bernie co-writer Skip Hollandsworth's 2001 Texas Monthly magazine article about the real-life, mild-mannered college professor turned fake hitman for hire, Gary Johnson. Hit Man makes for a near-perfect starring vehicle for the endlessly charming Powell that embraces fictionalizing its true crime-adjacent material.

FEAST | Italiano x Locanda dell'Orso x Opening x Victorian Hotel

Downtown—(May 13, 2024) A new authentic, family-style Italian restaurant, Locanda dell'Orso (Italian for "Inn of the Bear"), just opened for dinner service. It occupies Autostrada's old iconic downtown location (originally Cinara) underneath the historic Victorian Hotel on West Pender.

REEL | Fast and 'Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga' – Anya Taylor-Joy Lays Waste

"Do you have it in you to make it epic?"

Warner Bros. Pictures / Village Roadshow Pictures

George Miller, the 79-year-old Australian auteur, revisits the post-apocalyptic Wasteland in his blockbuster action prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Alyla Browne as younger versions of the eponymous heroine. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga takes elements from his previous films to build another viscerally exciting and visually exhilarating cinematic experience.

GENRE | Suburban Obsession – 'I Saw the TV Glow' x SIFF 2024

"This isn't the Midnight Realm! It's just the suburbs."

Seattle International Film Festival

Non-binary indie filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun writes and directs the coming-of-age, art-horror fantasy I Saw the TV Glow about how two troubled suburban youths spiral down a sinister path over their shared obsession with a supernatural cult television series from the mid-1990s that doubles as a transcendent examination of gender dysphoria.

SCREEN | Digitizing the Afterlife – 'Eternal You' x DOXA 2024

"It's able to hijack the things that we love the most."

DOXA Documentary Film Festival

Directors Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck delve into the deeply troubling world of a "digital afterlife" created by artificial intelligence to extend the lives of deceased loved ones in Eternal You. This very real technology allows startups to effectively digitize those who have passed away by generating simulated versions of them in order to comfort grieving survivors.

CABLE | 'The Sympathizer' Betrays South Vietnam on HBO

"All wars are fought twice."

A24 / Rhombus Media

The unlikely international filmmaking pairing of Korean auteur Park Chan-wook and Toronto director Don McKellar adapt Vietnamese-American professor Việt Thanh Nguyễn's bestselling 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning debut novel The Sympathizer (aka Cảm tình viên) into dizzingly postmodern historical miniseries dissecting the complex political machinations in the immediate aftermath of a post-Vietnam War United States in the late-1970s.

REEL | Battle for the 'Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes'

"Apes together strong."

20th Century Studios

The Maze Runner director Wes Ball takes over the durable Planet of the Apes series in a worthy but unnecessary extension of the simian-based franchise's mythology. Set several generations after Caesar's reign in the previous trilogy, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes manages to establish a relatively exciting new direction for the sci-fi action series that evolves the storyline into a biblical yarn involving a slave uprising against a tyrannical ape king.

SCREEN | Saving Cinema – 'The Movie Man' Projects x DOXA 2024

"We're not a destination for anything, really."

DOXA Documentary Film Festival

Toronto native Matt Finlin poignantly documents an elderly cinephile's life's work in The Movie Man. We follow septuagenarian business owner Keith Stata, the proprietor of the unique forty-year-old Highlands Cinemas located in the small hamlet village of Kinmount (population three hundred) in the backwoods of Ontario near the Kawartha Lakes, as he struggles to run a house-like movie theatre during challenging times without enough customers or residents to justify his self-described "five-screen movie palace."