Atom Egoyan’s The Captive is a film that asks: “What if Prisoners was made by someone who only read the Wikipedia summary and then directed it with mittens on?” Released in 2014, The Captive is Egoyan’s attempt at a mainstream kidnapping thriller. What it delivers instead is a disjointed, painfully earnest soap opera with the … Read More “The Captive (2014): A Canadian Abduction Thriller That Should Be Arrested for Wasting Your Time” »
Atom Egoyan’s Chloe is the kind of film that puts on lingerie, lights a candle, and then spends 90 minutes explaining its feelings while gently sobbing into a glass of Pinot Grigio. It wants to be sexy. It wants to be dangerous. It wants to be Fatal Attraction for people who use words like “problematize.” … Read More “Chloe (2009): When Erotic Thrillers Go Limp and Canadian” »
Atom Egoyan’s Devil’s Knot (2013) is a dramatization of the infamous West Memphis Three case—the 1993 murder of three young boys in Arkansas and the sensational trial that followed, in which three teenagers were convicted under a thick fog of Satanic Panic, moral hysteria, and just plain bad detective work. It’s a real-life story so … Read More ““Devil’s Knot” (2013) – Egoyan’s Forensic Naptime” »
Atom Egoyan’s Adoration (2008) is a movie that wants desperately to be profound. It wants to explore terrorism, grief, identity, technology, storytelling, memory, and a teenager playing the violin. Instead, it plays out like a high school debate club project stretched into a full-length film—awkward, confused, full of monologues that sound deep but mean nothing, … Read More ““Adoration” (2008) – Atom Egoyan’s Emo Tech Fair Submission” »
Atom Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies is a film that desperately wants to be dangerous, seductive, and layered with intrigue. Instead, it faceplants into the shag carpet of its own pretensions like a drunk lounge singer trying to nail a jazz solo in a karaoke bar. It’s supposed to be a neo-noir thriller full of … Read More “Where the Truth Lies (2005): A Sleazy, Snoozy Mystery With All the Erotic Charge of a Wet Sock” »
Atom Egoyan’s Ararat (2002) is a film about the Armenian Genocide—or at least that’s what the press kit insists. What it’s actually about is harder to say. It might be about denial, identity, intergenerational trauma, filmmaking, customs agents, art history, editing software, or the overwhelming power of Charles Aznavour’s eyebrows. Or maybe it’s just about … Read More ““Ararat” (2002) – Trauma, Turkey, and Tangents” »
There’s a moment early in Felicia’s Journey—Atom Egoyan’s 1999 psychological thriller where “psychological” means “nobody blinks” and “thriller” means “you might nod off”—when the titular Felicia, a naive Irish teenager, stares blankly at a British cityscape. In that moment, you can practically hear Egoyan whispering behind the camera: “Behold… alienation.” Unfortunately, all we behold is … Read More “Felicia’s Journey (1999): Atom Egoyan’s Half-Baked Serial Killer Soufflé” »
Let’s begin with a question: Have you ever wanted to watch a two-hour funeral for an entire town set in a snow globe of sorrow, where every character speaks like they’ve recently been diagnosed with terminal reflection? Welcome to Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter—a film so sad, so relentlessly elegiac, it should come with a … Read More “The Sweet Hereafter (1997): A Snowy, Somber, Soul-Sucking Slog” »
Atom Egoyan’s Exotica (1994) is a film about grief, longing, and exotic dancing—though not necessarily in that order, and not with any real enthusiasm. Set mostly in a dimly lit strip club that resembles a half-dead terrarium, this is a movie that takes a potentially titillating premise and then drains it of all joy, energy, … Read More ““Exotica” (1994) – A Strip Club with Feelings (And Zero Fun)” »
Atom Egoyan’s Calendar is what happens when a filmmaker stares into a void for too long and decides the void might make an interesting movie. Spoiler: it doesn’t. What we have here is not a film so much as an experimental hostage situation—one in which time, emotion, and narrative coherence are blindfolded and marched off … Read More “Calendar (1993): A Cinematic Root Canal in Twelve Bleeding Months” »