REEL | Pamela Anderson Retires 'The Last Showgirl' x WFF 2024

"Las Vegas used to treat us like movie stars."

Whistler Film Festival

Vancouver Island native Pamela Anderson makes her on-screen starring role comeback (after her 2022 Broadway stage debut in Chicago) in third-generation filmmaker Gia Coppola's melodic, working-class Las Vegas indie drama. The Last Showgirl deromanticizes a past collective sense of "old Vegas" and its previously idealized facade of sexy glamour.

REEL | Adrien Brody Rebuilds 'The Brutalist' x TIFF 2024

"Go to America and I will follow you."

Toronto International Film Festival

Filmed in the glorious 1950s VistaVision sideways 35mm widescreen format, actor-turned-director Brady Corbet makes his great American cinematic opus in the three-and-a-half hour, decades-spanning (1947-1980) epic. The Brutalist is framed as a post-WWII immigrant tale of staggering architectural ambition and scope extolling both all the opportunities and cruelties European Jews faced coming to America.

GENRE | Jude Law Chases Down 'The Order' x TIFF 2024

"You preach racial economics. We live it."

Toronto International Film Festival

Australian director Justin Kurzel directs a weary Jude Law as a loner FBI agent hunting the eponymous white supremacist domestic terrorist group active in the Pacific Northwest during the 1980s. Based on the 1989 non-fiction book, The Silent Brotherhood, by Denver journalists Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, The Order dramatizes the atrocities committed by a real-life splinter group of organized racist separatists committed to the violent insurrection of the United States.

SCREEN | André Holland Paints and Heals – 'Exhibiting Forgiveness'

"Some things can't be worked out on canvas."

Roadside Attractions / Vortex Media

Accomplished African-American contemporary painter Titus Kaphar makes his directing debut in a soulful but piercing Michigan family drama. Touching on issues of artistry, generational trauma, and parenthood through the lens of fractured fathers and sons, Exhibiting Forgiveness tells a tender semi-autobiographical story of forgiving yourself and your family.

CABLE | 'Skeleton Crew' Escapes A 'Star Wars' Adventure for Kids

"You have a lot to learn about pirates."

Lucasfilm

Skeleton Crew, the latest cutthroat Star Wars spin-off series, clearly channels Amblin's iconic 1980-90s era of children's adventure films in the mold of The Goonies meets Treasure Island—displaced to "a galaxy far, far away." There's plenty of well-needed coming-of-age discovery and wonder but some inconsistent elements and a slightly adrift tone never totally feel cohesive inside its greater shared universe.

REEL | Top 10 Films of 2024

Amazon MGM Studios / Warner Bros. Pictures

Click on each film title to read its corresponding review:

1) Challengers (dir. Luca Guadagnino)

2) The Brutalist (dir. Brady Corbet)

3) Anora (dir. Sean Baker) *

4) Evil Does Not Exist (dir. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi) *

5) Civil War (dir. Alex Garland)

GETAWAY | The Library by The Macallan x Four Seasons x Whistler

Whistler—(November 26, 2024) Late last month, press were invited up to the Four Seasons Resort Whistler for a quick but refreshing day trip to visit the 4-star luxury hotel's many amenities while also checking out the newly reopened The Library by The Macallan, an intimate whisky and cocktail pop-up bar, back for its second year.

REEL | Nicole Kidman Puts 'Babygirl' in A Corner x TIFF 2023

"I think you like to be told what to do."

Toronto International Film Festival

Nicole Kidman stars as a publically powerful but privately submissive CEO in Dutch writer/director Halina Reijn's psychosexual erotic thriller. Babygirl challenges notions of complex power dynamics when Kidman's high-ranking Romy succumbs to a forbidden May-December office affair with a much younger intern (Harris Dickinson).

REEL | Timothée Chalamet Walks Hard – 'A Complete Unknown'

"Every deck has two jokers, don't it?"

Searchlight Pictures

America's boyfriend Timothée Chalamet channels a young, pre-Highway 61 Revisited era of Bob Dylan, chronicling the folk singer's rise to fame in the early-1960s New York City set A Complete Unknown, based on the 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties by music historian Elijah Wald. Journeyman director James Mangold helms the period musical biopic with a measured verve and mastery of performances filmed in the moment with the actors recorded singing live to camera.