Frame Rated

☆☆☆☆☆ ★★★★★ Only upon a recent rewatch of Joachim Trier’s Reprise did it become clear how haunting his films are. Anyone, whether they love or hate his impressionistic slice-of-life cinema, can pick up on the sorrow coursing through them. Yet in every movie, an ethereal quality attaches to the loss that time inflicts on our lives. One of Trier’s first short films, Procter (2002), follows a man who finds a tape of a suicide and attempts to dissect what led to it.

☆☆☆☆☆ ★★★★★ When the world as you’ve known it comes to an end, how do you continue to live? When everyone you’ve loved is lost, and the mundane routines of daily life are long gone, how do you spend your days? When community vanishes and all that remains is the survival of the fittest, how far would you go to come out on top? These fundamental questions define every post-apocalyptic story ever made, and they sit right at the heart of The Dog Stars.

☆☆☆☆☆ ★★★★★ A Date for Mad Mary, Darren Thornton’s LGBTQ comedy-drama about a young woman struggling to reconcile her competing identities, effortlessly balances sentimentality and bitterness. Plot beats regularly convince viewers that a sweet, trite film will come to the fore, only for Thornton to plunge his protagonist straight back into misery.

☆☆☆☆☆ ★★★★★ Mere days before the biggest bout of his career, Finnish boxer Olli Mäki (Jarkko Lahti) finds himself overcome by doubt in Juho Kuosmanen’s The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki / Hymyilevä mies. Olli’s spent his whole life training for this moment—a fight for a world title, facing off against American boxer Davey Moore (John Bosco Jr.) in his home country—but something’s changed.

☆☆☆☆☆ ★★★★★ ‘Burnt Offerings has no peer. Better than Rosemary’s Baby, The Other, and The Exorcist.’ That is how The Hartford Courant lauded the 1973 novel by Robert Marasco. 50 years on from its film adaptation, at least two of those other titles have become the definitive terrifying tykes in all fiction. More frightening tales like Phantasm (1979) and So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993) were shot at the Dunsmuir House and have overshadowed this quaint 1976 horror.

☆☆☆☆☆ ★★★★★ It’s difficult to imagine anyone watching Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale and not being thoroughly entertained. The only fair criticism would be that it gives audiences exactly what they want within a fairly traditional narrative structure. Yet, 25 years later, it still feels fresh and is neither a generic costume drama nor a standard sports movie.

☆☆☆☆☆ ★★★★★ “No, but that’s a good story. I like that,” was how director John Carpenter shut down persistent rumours that he had retooled his aborted third Snake Plissken film into this original feature. A wasted effort, given that almost every article before and after that interview continues to regurgitate the same copy-pasted hearsay — perhaps to give audiences more reason to like the project, or to justify him still making it.

☆☆☆☆☆ ★★★★★ Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun is clearly a talented filmmaker, whose own queer, non-binary journey has provided the jumping-off point for their work. Schoenbrun’s previous feature, I Saw the TV Glow (2024), was an allegorical tale about the dangers of repressed gender dysphoria and trans identity, wrapped up inside the story of two lonely high-school students who bond over a late-night, surreal 1990s show called The Pink Opaque.

☆☆☆☆☆ ★★★★★ Just outside Albuquerque, New Mexico, Wile E. Coyote (”have brain, will travel”) continues his never-ending quest to catch the Road Runner, the remarkably fast, long-legged bird who communicates via beeps. As scholars of cartoons will know, he uses various contraptions from the Acme Corporation in his quest, such as rocket-powered roller skates and Rube Goldberg devices.

☆☆☆☆☆ ★★★★★ There’s a hierarchy within the traditional high school movie: a sub-genre encompassing a remarkable range of tones and sensibilities. Some are earnest and perceptive; others remain exuberant and outrageous. Yet, the films that continue to reverberate across generations all share a common objective.