Oil Lamps (1975)

These confines won’t really encourage you to read the film as a metaphor for the nerve-inducing experience we’ve all been through over the last year, however — and in the interest of maintaining your dignity, you probably shouldn’t. While the sociopolitical commentary may have worked for the similarly-themed Buried (2010), in which we find Ryan Reynolds on his own buried alive in the Middle East, but this futuristic take on the premise is best left as a piece of distracting entertainment. Nevertheless, the atmosphere is no less suffocating, literally and dramatically.

I understood post-memory as passing down stories and images of one’s experiences that are not your own. For decades, rape has been depicted in cinema through a third-person perspective, leaving the viewer to observe rape; not to experience it. 

The French-born director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s strategic choice to entrust the interpretation of a conventional, feminine character to a non-binary actor pays off: Corrin’s Lady Chatterley is awkward, edgy, and uninhibited at the same time. 

Peppered with whimsical humor, heartbreaking realizations, and heartwarming discoveries, The Incomer is surprisingly endearing through and through.

Lee Daniels’s Billie Holiday biopic The United States vs. Billie Holiday was released on February 26th, 2021, and my immediate reaction to it was one of discomfort.

'Midnight at the Paradise' premieres tomorrow at Toronto's Paradise Theatre! I had the pleasure to sit down with Vanessa Matsui to discuss the making of this film.