By John Corrado
The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto
In American Cats: The Good, The Bad, and The Cuddly, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee correspondent Amy Hoggart sets out on a mission to explore America’s love affair with cats. But she ends up doing a deep-dive into the controversial practice of cat declawing instead, and the surprisingly powerful industry behind it.
Hoggart discovers a near-billion dollar industry around declawing cats, a procedure that only takes roughly eleven minutes to complete. She finds that the practice, which is only commonly done in the United States, is done more to protect an owner’s furniture from being scratched, instead of for the benefit of the cats themselves. It’s not just clipping the nails, but a surgery that essentially removes the cat’s top knuckle bones, leaving their paws floppy and mutilated.
The cute cats and Hoggart’s humour make American Cats an entertaining expose, but many of the facts are also upsetting. While supporters of the procedure argue that it’s done to stop cats from scratching, behaviouralists point out that it actually leaves cats more likely to bite if they are in pain. One of the cats Hoggart meets is Burrito, a cat at a no-kill shelter who was surrendered for acting aggressively, due to the pain he is in from the leftover bone fragments after having all four of his paws declawed.
Directed by Todd Bieber, who follows the pregnant Hoggart as she interviews pet owners and experts on both sides of the issue, American Cats becomes a deeper look at animal welfare laws as a whole. Peter Weinstein, a representative from the AVMA (American Veterinary Medical Association), has fought to keep declawing legal, while veterinarian Dr. Jennifer Conrad has led the fight to get the practise banned across the United States, but gets pushback every step of the way by the powerful vet lobby.
The one good thing Hoggart discovers is that cats might be able to bridge the political divide, finding common ground between those on the right and left. She interviews Curtis Sliwa, the Republican New York mayoral candidate who lives in a three hundred square foot apartment with eighteen cats that he considers family, as well as an anarchist bookstore owner who also loves cats, but is on the complete opposite end of the political spectrum. Come for the cute cats, stay for the informative and engaging look at an important animal rights issue.
Film Rating: ★★★ (out of 4)
American Cats: The Good, The Bad, and The Cuddly screens as part of the 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here.
#HotDocs24 Review: Curl Power
By John Corrado
The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto
Director Josephine Anderson follows a girls curling team from British Columbia in her excellent and surprisingly poignant documentary Curl Power. But more so than just being a sports movie about the under appreciated nature of curling, her film is about friendship and growing up.
Hannah, Brooklyn, Savannah, Ashley and Amy are best friends who make up the 4KGIRL$, a high school curling team coached by three of their mothers, former curling champions who played for Team Canada at the 2002 Olympics. The dream is to become Canadian Junior Curling Champions, but they are still going through the process of being normal teenagers in a sleepy suburban community.
Anderson’s film takes the form of a hangout movie at times, capturing naturalistic moments of the girls bonding and supporting each other on and off the ice. They talk about body image issues, mental health, and the precarious nature of being a teenager in high school (you’re no longer a child, one of them muses, but you’re also not an adult).
The friendship between these girls is what drives the beautifully shot film, as Anderson spins this into a classic coming-of-age narrative. Her film poignantly captures the feeling of growing up and leaving your childhood behind, but unsure exactly where to go next. For these reasons, Curl Power transcends just being another sports movie. It’s a small gem.
Film Rating: ★★★½ (out of 4)
Curl Power screens as part of the 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here.
#HotDocs24 Review: Rouge
By John Corrado
The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto
At River Rouge High School in Michigan, the Panthers rule the basketball court, with fourteen state championships to their name. In his documentary Rouge, first time director Hamoody Jafaar offers a portrait of this school and community, but also a personal look at how high school basketball opens up opportunities for these kids that they wouldn’t otherwise have.
For students like Legend Geeter, who dreams of going to Michigan State like Michael Jordan, or Ahmoni Weston, who leaves at six in the morning to commute to the school with his family pouring what little they have into his basketball career, playing on the team represents a way to succeed in life. Through interviews with former coaches and players, including former player LaMonta Stone who has returned to coach the team, who reminisce about their time at the school, it becomes a nostalgic history lesson of the River Rouge community.
Even for those of us who don’t really follow high school basketball, Rouge delivers the moments of triumph and defeat that you expect from any sports movie. Through widescreen cinematography, and smooth editing that cuts between interviews, archival footage, and verite moments with the subjects, the film offers an engaging portrait of the school spirit that drives this team.
Film Rating: ★★★ (out of 4)
Rouge screens as part of the 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here.
#HotDocs24 Review: Chasing Time
By John Corrado
The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto
In 2012, director Jeff Orlowski-Yang released his documentary Chasing Ice, a beautifully shot portrait of National Geographic photographer James Balog. The film followed Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey project, which saw him capturing stunning time-lapse images of melting glaciers, to help visually document the impacts of a changing climate.
Teaming with first time director Sarah Keo, Orlowski-Yang now returns to this subject in his mid-length documentary Chasing Time, which follows Balog and his crew as they travel to Iceland to remove the final remaining camera after fifteen years. It’s a way for Balog to officially bring the EIS project to a close, after capturing hundreds of thousands of images.
Seeing the time-lapse images of melting glaciers was moving enough on its own in Chasing Ice, and seeing Balog return to say goodbye to the project brings an extra emotional weight to Chasing Time. As the story takes shape over the course of the film’s brisk 39 minutes, it becomes more of a reflective piece about the reality of running out of time. As a companion piece to Chasing Ice, Chasing Time serves as a bittersweet coda to Balog’s journey of capturing the melting ice caps.
Film Rating: ★★★ (out of 4)
Chasing Time screens as part of Shorts Program 2 at the 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here.
#HotDocs24 Review: The Fabulous Gold Harvesting Machine
By John Corrado
The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto
Toto is an aging gold harvester in Tierra del Fuego in Chile, who spends his days panning for gold in the old fashioned way, finding small specks that he carefully separates out from the dirt. In his sixties, Toto relies on selling these specks of gold to tourists, but his body is breaking down, and his son Jorge is worried about how long he can continue doing this on his own.
Director Alfredo Pourailly De La Plaza provides a portrait of this father and son in his slice-of-life documentary The Fabulous Gold Harvesting Machine. The film follows them as Jorge tries to build a trommel, a gold harvesting machine, for his dad. Toto is an eccentric old guy (he takes seven spoonfuls of sugar in his coffee and has strong feelings about what happens after death), and often bickers with Jorge. But it’s clearly because the son cares about his father, and wishes that he would take his health more seriously. It’s a simple but charming and enjoyable father-son story.
Film Rating: ★★★ (out of 4)
The Fabulous Gold Harvesting Machine screens as part of the 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here.
#HotDocs24 Review: Singing Back the Buffalo
By John Corrado
The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto
In her latest documentary, Cree filmmaker Tasha Hubbard explores the efforts to reintroduce herds of wild buffalo to Indigenous lands in Canada and the United States. Hubbard, who also narrates the film, explores the work of Blackfoot Elder Leroy Little Bear and the ITBC (Intertribal Buffalo Council) to restore buffalo populations across the Great Plains, starting with a Buffalo Treaty signed by eight nations in 2014. This includes monitoring the buffalo populations in Alberta’s Elk Island National Park, where the creatures are shipped to places like Montana.
Like Hubbard’s previous film nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up, Singing Back the Buffalo offers an absorbing deep dive into Indigenous history and culture, with buffalo being viewed as sacred animals that they share a deep connection with. Hubbard explores the history of how wild buffalo were driven from the land and often replaced with herds of cows (leading to them developing cattle diseases in some cases), tying the disappearance and displacement of buffalo to colonization.
Hubbard looks at herds of wild buffalo in Yellowstone (where they can legally be shot if they cross over border into Montana), as well as on a more uplifting note the successful reintroduction of wild plains bison in Banff. It’s the important role that buffalo play in the ecosystem as a whole that her film does an excellent job of highlighting; their fur traps and spreads seeds, their footsteps help stomp carbon back into the ground. This is an informative and ultimately hopeful film, carried by George Hupka’s gorgeous cinematography of buffalo roaming the wild landscapes.
Film Rating: ★★★½ (out of 4)
Singing Back the Buffalo screens as part of the 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here.
By John Corrado
New releases for the week of April 26th, 2024.
Theatrical Releases:
Challengers (Wide Release): This latest film from Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, Bones and All) centres around a steamy ménage à trois between three tennis players, played by Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist. I’m hearing it’s electric filmmaking, with an exceptional score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. I’m pumped to check it out.
Boy Kills World (Limited Release): Bill Skarsgård stars in this cartoony, Sam Raimi-produced action comedy as Boy, a deaf-mute fighter trained in martial arts, seeking revenge against the dictator (Famke Janssen) that killed his family. I had a decent amount of fun at the Midnight Madness screening of this at TIFF last year. It’s the sort of loopy, cheesy anime-inspired B-movie martial arts action comedy that plays best with a crowd at midnight (the crowd went wild for the cheese grater!). I don’t know if anything can top seeing this at midnight (with inflatable globes being floated around the audience, no less), but it features an enjoyable physical performance by Skarsgård.
I Don’t Know Who You Are (Limited Release): Director M.H. Murray’s anxiety-inducing debut feature centres around Benjamin (Mark Clennon), a struggling musician in Toronto who is dealing with the aftermath of a horrific sexual assault. It’s a tense drama, carried by Clennon’s powerful performance. (TIFF 2023 Review)
More Releases: Humane (Limited), Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (Limited), The King Tide (Limited), Unsung Hero (Limited)
Streaming Releases:
Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story (Disney+), Disneynature’s Tiger (Disney+), The Inventor (VOD/Digital)
#HotDocs24 Review: The Here Now Project
By John Corrado
The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto
In The Here Now Project, co-directors Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel offer a portrait of increasingly severe weather conditions attributed to climate change, culled together from thousands of hours of videos shot by regular people over the course of 2021.
We see on-the-ground footage from the aftermath of the freak snowstorm in Texas that took out the state’s ill-prepared power grid, swarms of locusts in Kenya, subway flooding in China, the effects of hurricane Ida in New York, and the alarming rise in forest fires raging around the world (including stressful body cam footage shot by a smokejumper).
Regardless of how you feel about the format going in, with the film essentially being made up of random people’s cell phone videos, The Here Now Project is often surprisingly engaging. If it maybe gets a little too preachy at the end with the subjects providing messages over the end credits, the images are more than powerful enough to speak for themselves. The film unfolds at times like a found footage disaster movie, with these compelling snippets of people experiencing extreme weather conditions edited together into a cohesive, real-life portrait of a changing climate.
Film Rating: ★★★ (out of 4)
The Here Now Project screens as part of the 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here.
#HotDocs24 Review: An Unfinished Journey
By John Corrado
The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto
When Afghanistan fell back to the Taliban after the United States withdrawal in 2021, women almost immediately lost all of the progress that they had slowly made in the country. Girls weren’t allowed to continue school, and female members of parliament were no longer permitted to serve in government.
In their documentary An Unfinished Journey, co-directors Aeyliya Husain and Amie Williams follow four women from Afghanistan – including the former MPs Homaira Ayubi and Zefnoon Safi, former government minister Nargis Nehan, and former TV reporter Nilofar Moradi – who have now settled in Canada. The film follows these women as they try to adapt to their lives in Canada, while still fighting for the rights of the women and girls left behind in Afghanistan.
Husain and Williams take us through a brief history of Afghanistan, while mainly focusing on how the women are now trying to work with representatives of the Canadian government to improve things back home so girls can continue to get educations. “If a man is educated, he only changes himself,” former teacher Ayubi says at one point, but “if a girl is educated, she can change a family.” At 75 minutes, the film feels a bit short, but offers a mostly engaging portrait of these women. Their resilience, even in the face of insurmountable odds, is what carries through the film.
Film Rating: ★★★ (out of 4)
An Unfinished Journey screens as part of the 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here.
Movie Review: The Inventor
By John Corrado
The stop-motion animated movie The Inventor is best described as an elaborate, lovingly crafted tribute to old school Rankin/Bass specials, inspired by the final years of Leonardo da Vinci’s life.
The film begins in Rome circa 1515, where da Vinci (voiced by Stephen Fry) is a kooky inventor with a long white beard (and, in classic Rankin/Bass fashion, a little mouth that appears over it when he speaks), who is seen as going against the Catholic Church.
Da Vinci is challenging Pope Leo X (Matt Berry), who views his scientific inquiries as an affront to the church, and would rather he focus on making war machines instead. The film then moves to France in 1517, where Leonardo takes refuge in the French courts to carry on his work inventing flying machines and searching for the meaning of life through dissecting bodies, finding an unlikely muse in French princess Marguerite de Nevarre (Daisy Ridley).
It’s easy to describe The Inventor as a curious project, one that aims to blend educational movie, and satire about how a visionary genius like da Vinci was treated by the institutions of his time (including some macabre dark humour around his grave-robbing and autopsy work). If this sounds like odd material for an animated movie that otherwise seems aimed at younger audiences with its feel-good messages about scientific discovery, that’s because it is (the film is also a musical, with several original songs by Alex Mandel).
The juxtaposition doesn’t always work, and there is some question of who exactly the target audience for this film is, with its main appeal probably being to art and animation fans who will best appreciate the visually pleasing throwback style. That said, the material sometimes feels a little too dry considering the artistry on display, and the film runs long at 99 minutes, with the fairly simple story running out of steam at points.
But the film is a clear passion project for writer-director Jim Capobianco, a former Disney and Pixar story artist who helped develop the story for Ratatouille. Expanding his 2009 short film Leonardo to feature length, the Kickstarter-funded feature allows Capobianco and co-director Pierre-Luc Granjon to play around with old-school animation techniques, including lovely 2D-animated sequences drawing upon da Vinci’s inventions. The stop-motion sets themselves have a wonderfully tactile feel to them, and the hand-painted look of the characters adds to the film’s simple charm.
Film Rating: ★★½ (out of 4)
The Inventor is available on a variety of VOD/Digital platforms as of April 23rd, and is also receiving a limited theatrical run in selected theatres.
The Joy of Movies 