News

If the commercial and critical success of horror films from Jordan Peele, Zach Cregger, and David Gordon Green in recent years illustrates anything, it’s that folks in the comedy biz can often serve up major doses of effective white-knuckle chills. With the buzz following the recently released trailer for “Saturday Night Live” alum Kyle Mooney’s upcoming Y2K, the Hollywood comedy-to-horror pipeline is clearly functioning in full force–and we’d happily welcome more from impassioned cross-genre creators like these.

Enter Milk & Serial, a found footage horror feature that premiered on YouTube this month courtesy of That’s a Bad Idea, an up-and-coming comedy duo made up of film-school-pals-turned-collaborators Curry Barker and Cooper Tomlinson.

Written/directed by Barker and produced by Tomlinson, Milk & Serial follows a well-known social media comedy team (played by Barker and Tomlinson) whose lives are thrown into a tailspin following a birthday prank intended for their channel.

A biopic of Anthony Bourdain is in the works, with The Holdovers breakout Dominic Sessa in talks to play the late celebrity chef and travel documentarian. As first reported by Deadline, Sessa, who portrayed Angus Tully in the Oscar-nominated film The Holdovers, is in line to play Bourdain in Tony, a biopic from Star Thrower Entertainment, the production company behind The Post, King Richard, and Eternity. The outlet also reports that A24 is in talks with BlackBerry director and co-writer Matt Johnson to helm the project. Johnson is a Canadian actor and filmmaker known for his low-budget independent feature films The Dirties (2013) and Operation Avalanche (2016) and the Vice comedy series Nirvanna the Band the Show. Lou Howe and Todd Bartels wrote the screenplay for the film, while A24 is in talks to produce with Trevor White and Tim White under their Star Thrower banner, along with Johnson and Matthew Miller.

Let’s preheat the oven, there’s an Anthony Bourdain biopic on the menu.

As per The Hollywood Reporter, the ingredients are put together for a film about the beloved chef, traveler and troubadour who became a sensation with the publication of his 2000 memoir “Kitchen Confidential,” and hosted several television series. He tragically died by suicide in 2018.

Dominic Sessa, the young co-star of last year’s Oscar-nominated picture “The Holdovers” is said to be playing the lead in “Tony.”

“Tony” is set up at the tony distributor A24, and given the pedigree of its lead and director, is poised to conquer the mindspace of editors at New York and Los Angeles-based lifestyle publications. A recent feature documentary about Bourdain, “Roadrunner,” was released in 2021 and his book “Kitchen Confidential” was adapted into a Fox sitcom that didn’t quite hit in 2005, starring Bradley Cooper. Bourdain’s television work as a host...

After four days of celebrating and acknowledging Canadian achievements on screens of all shapes and sizes the winners were announced at a ceremony on Friday night.    On the film side we don't think anyone is surprised that Matt Johnson's BlackBerry dominated this year with a whopping fourteen awards, a record for the CSAs. Among the awards won were Best Motion Picture, Achievement in Direction for Matt Johnson, Performance in a Leading Role, Comedy for Jay Baruchel, and Performance in a Supporting Role, Comedy for Glenn Howerton.   BlackBerry is not genre but we do consider Johnson one of ours for his films The DIrties and Operation Avalance. These are wins for us by proxy. Specifically to the genre side of things there were two bigs...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Barking Dogs Never Bite

Slamdance Film Festival has announced it is going to move to Los Angeles from Utah in 2025.

The festival, which started off on the fringes of Sundance Film Festival in 1995, has since grown to a force to be reckoned with in its own right, with films getting their break there including Christopher Nolan's Following, Bong Joon-ho's Barking Dogs Never Bite and Matt Johnson's The Dirties.

It has traditionally run alongside Sundance in Park City, Utah, this year noticeably taking on a much more central and larger venue for its screenings. The switch saw an 18% rise in ticket sales. The festival said in a statement that the LA move will "allow it to expand its mission of supporting truly independent filmmakers" while giving better accessibility to attendees.

Slamdance president and co-founder Peter Baxter Founder and president of the festival Peter Baxter said: “Slamdance is coming to Los Angeles!

Matt Johnson’s boisterous drama about the rise and fall of the mobile – and the Canadian nerds who created it – diverges refreshingly from the usual arc of product success stories

Tech years are like dog years. Less than a decade and a half has passed since the early 2010 sheyday of the BlackBerry smartphone. But in the accelerated world of technology, the once coveted accessory of any self-respecting business bigshot or self-promoting celebrity (Paris Hilton used to carry five of them at a time) now might as well be an ancient relic.

By any standard, the BlackBerry story is a wild ride – going from a prototype cobbled together from bits of a pocket calculator to a product so addictive that it was nicknamed the CrackBerry; from a share of the US mobile phone market that was at one point estimated at about 40% to virtual oblivion in the space of just a few years.

Exclusive: CAA has signed Matt Johnson and Matthew Miller, the filmmaker collaborators behind the acclaimed dramedy BlackBerry, which made its domestic premiere at SXSW after world premiering in competition at this year’s Berlin Film Festival.

Co-written by Johnson and Miller, BlackBerry chronicles the rise and fall of the world’s first smartphone. Johnson stars opposite Glenn Howerton and Jay Baruchel in the film, based on Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry, which Miller produced.

In Deadline’s review of the film released in the U.S. by IFC Films on May 12th, Pete Hammond wrote, “Who knew a Canadian biopic of an infamous smartphone could be this entertaining, even poignant and moving? I am here to tell you today’s world premiere Berlin Film Festival competition entry BlackBerry is all that and more.

In 2010, David Fincher set the template for modern tech biopic with “The Social Network,” delivering a rapid-fire seriocomic portrait of young entrepreneurship at the dawn of the 21st century. It cost $40 million. Last year, filmmaker Matt Johnson made “BlackBerry,” a biopic about the rise and fall of the eccentric characters behind the outdated mobile phone. It cost $5 million.

“The amount of money that gets spent on making a movie is completely mind-boggling to me,” Johnson told IndieWire over Zoom. “We were pretty clear from the beginning we would make something on the scale we prefer.”

That ethos was established 10 years ago, when the Canadian director made the buzzy found footage movie “The Dirties,” in which Johnson starred as an aspiring filmmaker who morphs into a high school shooter. The $10,000 movie manages a tricky balance between satirizing its character’s cinematic aspirations and the looming alienation that drives him to a horrific extreme.

Plot: The rise and fall of BlackBerry through the eyes of its founder and creator Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and co-ceo Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton) as they go from being upstarts to dominating the smartphone market, and eventually, getting rendered obsolete by the rise of iPhone.

Review: Does anyone remember the term “crackberry?” That was a popular nickname for the BlackBerry when it first hit the market around 1999, as it was the first cell phone that allowed for effective emailing via your mobile device. It had its own dedicated server that meant people, for the first time, could send and receive emails from their phones – quickly. Soon they added web browsing, cameras and more, all of which seemed like science fiction when the company started pitching the product in the mid-nineties. For a long time, they were the great Canadian success story, with them based in Waterloo, Ontario, only for...

Chicago – As technology goes, it seems so long ago, but at its peak the first multi-use smartphone was nicknamed the “CrackBerry” because of user addiction. The product’s improbable rise and fall is told in the new film “BlackBerry,” co-written/directed and featuring Matt Johnson.

it’s 1996, and Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and his business partner and best friend Douglas Fregin (Johnson) are on the edge of creating the world’s first smartphone. Unfortunately for them, they are less business savvy than they are tech, and struggle to keep afloat their Canadian company. Everything changes when cunning business man Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton) agrees to fund the concept, bringing with him the money and experience needed to create a prototype of their invention.

Matt Johnson (inset) on Set in ‘BlackBerry’

Photo credit: IFC Films

“BlackBerry” is a Canadian produced film, and Matt Johnson was born in Toronto. After creating the...

Can a festival have swagger? Because it felt like SXSW was swaggering in 2023. This should not be a total surprise for a weeklong conference that’s an intersection between film, television, music, gaming, technology, and arguably innovation itself. As per one industry insider, SXSW has long been perceived as “the cool kids festival.” Nonetheless, one year and a day after Everything Everywhere All at Once premiered on SXSW’s opening night, that film went on to win a staggering seven Oscars on the same weekend as the 2023 festival.

And after last Sunday, excitement and a sense of vindication floated in the air around every movie theater in Austin. Somehow this fest was coming even more into its own with its first Best Picture win, and that truth appears reflected in the eclectic mix of films and television series that showed up the year Everything Everywhere came to town. From oddball...

"BlackBerry" is an entertaining, often hilarious look at the rise and fall of the first smartphone, a fascinating exploration of the price of innovation in the ruthless business world and how well intentions and a passion for bringing fantasy and fiction to reality don't always merge well with the need to know how to make money. Make no mistake, this is not the Canadian version of "The Social Network," it is the real-life version of Mike Judge's "Silicon Valley."

Back in the '90s, communications were going through a revolution — the rise of personal computers, of the cellphone. It is a time when technology threatens to completely change — if not outright kill — the way we do work and business traditionally. The world is ready to have an entire office in the palm of your hands, it just needs a couple of geniuses to make it happen.

This movie is not about those geniuses,...

In the hands of anyone else, a movie about the birth of a technological innovation that reshaped culture may seem like a simple knockoff of The Social Network or Steve Jobs. However, under the uniquely humorous lens of Canadian director Matt Johnson, behind The Dirties and Operation Avalanche, his latest film BlackBerry piqued our interest. After stops at Berlinale and SXSW, the film starring Jay Baruchel, Glenn Howerton, and Johnson––in the story of the men that charted the course of the spectacular rise and catastrophic demise of the world’s first smartphone––will now arrive this May. Ahead of the release, the first trailer has landed.

Rory O’Connor said in his review, “Johnson, who also stars as the amiable Fregin opposite Jay Baruchel’s introverted Lazaridis, is the Canadian director behind Operation Avalanche––a film that seamlessly blended documentary aesthetics with newsreel footage to tell the story of how...

Glasgow Film Festival ran from March 1-12, screening 123 features.

A joy-filled Glasgow Film Festival (Gff) drew to a close last night (March 12) with the UK premiere of Nida Manzoor’s Polite Society, while Riceboy Sleeps scooped the festival’s only prize, the audience award, in what co-director Allan Hunter described as the “tightest” voting race in Gff’s audience award history.

Riceboy Sleeps is directed by Anthony Shim, and premiered at Toronto last year. It follows a South Korean family’s attempts to adapt to a new life in Canada, produced by Shim, Rebecca Steele and Bryan Demore. The family...

Glasgow Film Festival ran from March 1-12, screening 123 features.

A joy-filled Glasgow Film Festival (Gff) drew to a close last night (March 12) with the UK premiere of Nida Manzoor’s Polite Society, while Riceboy Sleeps scooped the festival’s only prize, the audience award, in what co-director Allan Hunter described as the “tightest” voting race in Gff’s audience award history.

Riceboy Sleeps is directed by Anthony Shim, and premiered at Toronto last year. It follows a South Korean family’s attempts to adapt to a new life in Canada, produced by Shim, Rebecca Steele and Bryan Demore. The family...

Is there anything worse than becoming obsolete? It’s a fear many share — to be slowly forgotten and discarded, left on a proverbial roadside as the rest of the world continues to innovate at pace around us. It isn’t just a business concern, but a human one: the innate craving for relevancy in a world where something or someone shinier than you is always around the corner.

The BlackBerry, with its distinctive Qwerty click-click keypad, met a sobering fate when it faded into quiet obscurity in the past decade — going from having a 43 percent market share in 2010 to zero percent just six years later — and when it was announced that a film charting the smartphone’s rise and fall had landed a Berlinale competition slot, one’s initial thoughts were: oh, that old thing?

But “BlackBerry,” which follows Canadian software company Research in Motion and the mistakes made by...

For a hot minute, it looked like BlackBerry might control the smartphone market. They got there first, figuring out how to use the existing data network to put email in users’ hands. Sure, it all came packaged in a device as thick and unwieldy as a slice of French toast — too big for most people’s pockets, not at all comfortable to hold up to one’s ear. Still, Canada-based electronics company Research in Motion revolutionized how mobile phones worked and what they could do, making billionaires of its co-founders. So what happened?

Frantic, irreverent and endearingly scrappy, “BlackBerry” spins comedy from the seat-of-their-pants launch and subsequent flame-out of “that phone that people had before they bought an iPhone,” as one character puts it. Directed by Matt Johnson — the renegade mock-doc helmer responsible for 2013 Slamdance winner “The Dirties” and moon-landing hoax “Project Avalanche” — from a script he co-wrote with longtime collaborator Matthew Miller,...

The entrance and exit of the BlackBerry smartphone is truly an all-thumbs tale – that of a beloved keyboard on a game-changing wireless device, and a Canadian company (Research in Motion) not terribly dexterous with innovation after the market pie went from “CrackBerry”-flavored to Apple-forward.

Equal parts high-tension business saga and nerd comedy, Matt Johnson’s feature “BlackBerry” – adapted with co-writer Matthew Miller from a book about the phone’s meteoric life (“Losing the Signal”) — parses the origins of the device’s success and the seeds of its downfall. Naturally, the story is bracketed by scrappy sorcery on one end and Steve Jobs’ competition-destroying genius on the other, but at its heart is the strange-bedfellows relationship between soft-spoken engineer Mike Laziridis (a silver-haired Jay Baruchel) and his shrewd, take-no-prisoners co-ceo Jim Balsillie.

The result, at a well-paced but unnecessarily long two hours, is a seriocomic cautionary tale of butting personalities in a fast-changing world,...

After breaking into NASA to make his last movie, “Operation Avalanche,” one would think that “BlackBerry” — a film that, on paper, sounds like a standard book adaptation about a Canadian boom-and-bust story — would be a walk in the park for Matt Johnson.

For anyone else, it might have been. But short-cuts don’t compute for the Toronto-based helmer. His outright rejection of Hollywood’s camera tricks in place of a wild do-it-yourself approach has made him one of the most radical new voices emerging from Canada.

In “BlackBerry,” which world premieres on Friday, Johnson tackles the story of one of Canada’s greatest modern inventions, the BlackBerry mobile phone — tracing its spectacular ascent into a global phenomenon that brought email to users’ fingertips, to its tragic downfall in the wake of corporate mismanagement and the dawn of Apple’s iPhone.

“It’s an odd couple, that’s for sure,” Johnson admits.

Additional rights sell for Middle East, Scandinavia, airlines on eve of world premiere. IFC Films to distribute in US.

In a major swoop on a competition title by a US studio Paramount Global Content Distribution has acquired all international rights outside select territories to Matt Johnson’s BlackBerry.

Co-financier XYZ Films brokered the deal heading into Friday’s world premiere and has additionally struck a raft of individual territory sales on the story about the rise and catastrophic fall of the BlackBerry smartphone.

IFC Films will release in the US this year and Elevation Pictures will distribute in Canada. Additional...

We slept on the First SXSW lineup announcement mid-January, but we wouldn't dare not mention that the second wave has been announced and it includes the North American premiere of one pretty damned anticipated film. Blackberry is the long-awaited feature follow-up to Operation Avalanche by The Dirties director Matt Johnson. It's billed as "The story of the meteoric rise and catastrophic demise of the world's first smartphone," but something tells me this won't be a typical tech narrative. It stars Jay Baruchel, Glenn Howerton, Cary Elwes, Saul Rubinek, and Matt himself. The film will make its world premiere at Berlin this month, but those stateside will get their first chance to see it at SXSW. We've got the full lineup below, collated from the two...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Before the iPhone, there was the mighty BlackBerry — the world’s first smartphone, which enjoyed a meteoric rise in the early 2000s only to meet a catastrophic demise.

A new movie from “The Dirties” and “Operation Avalanche” director Matt Johnson, simply entitled “BlackBerry,” will detail the rise and fall of the once-ubiquitous device as its Canadian parent company Research in Motion floundered in legal disputes and eventually lost its market advantage to competitors such as Apple and Samsung. At the heart of the story is the business relationship between co-founders Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie.

The film’s cast is led by Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton. Though it’s not yet confirmed, it’s likely they will play the firm’s founders.

Other cast members include Cary Elwes, Saul Rubinek, Rich Sommer, Martin Donovan, Michael Ironside and Johnson.

Johnson and Miller adapted the screenplay from the bestselling 2015 book “Losing...

Not the only festival to shift plans during the pandemic, Slamdance Film Festival will take place virtually from January 27 through February 6 with quite an accessible All-Access Pass for just $10. Year after year, the event has championed truly independent filmmaking and the 2022 edition is no different. One of the most intriguing films in this year’s slate, Therapy Dogs, is executive produced by festival alums Matthew Miller and Matt Johnson, and ahead of the world premiere, we’re pleased to debut the exclusive trailer.

Directed by Ethan Eng, who co-wrote the script and stars in the film with Justin Morrice, the film follows two best friends who set out to create the ultimate senior video for their graduating class of 2019. With an anarchic spirit to closing out their high school era, the film looks to be an authentic portrayal of this moment in life, with the energy of Project X and...

Can you laugh with the boy holding the gun? The short answer is, "Yes." The slightly longer answer is, "Quite a lot, but with a hell of a caveat." And the longest answer is the rest of this review. Looking like the freshest-faced 16-year old you could imagine, Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson crab-walked, moon-walked -- or maybe he was doing the robot -- onto the internet scene with the out-there, mockdoc web series Nirvana The Band The Show. The Dirties is his first feature, which he also stars in as... Matt Johnson. Matt and his buddy Owen Williams (Owen Williams) play high school film geeks who are the target of a group of bullies they dub 'The Dirties.' As a way to cope with the...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Over the past quarter century, the Slamdance Film Festival has served as a launchpad for a number of now high profile filmmakers at the very start of their careers. Here is a baker’s dozen of some of the festival’s greatest discoveries.

Marc Forster

“Loungers”

Forster premiered his $10,000 debut in 1995 and grabbed the Audience Award, and has become one of the most versatile directors working, with other credits including “Monster’s Ball,” “Finding Neverland,” “Stay,” “The Kite Runner,” “Stranger Than Fiction,” “Quantum of Solace,” “World War Z” and “Christopher Robin.”

Rian Johnson

“Evil Demon Golfball from Hell!!!”

Johnson’s irreverent short film played the festival in 1996, launching a career that has dabbled in artistic indies and big-budget franchise blockbusters (“Star Wars: The Last Jedi”).

Greg Mottola

“The Daytrippers”

The writer-director’s 1996 feature debut was produced by Steven Soderbergh and got Mottola work on cult-classic television series “Undeclared,” “Arrested Development,...

In March 1985, the great George Plimpton wrote a piece for Sports Illustrated that told the story of Sidd Finch, a seemingly out-of-nowhere mountain man who was raised in an English orphanage, studied yoga in Tibet, and was now discovered by the New York Mets. The team was desperate to keep him under wraps because he threw the baseball at 168 mph. After creating an enormous stir inside the media and the sport itself with Plimpton’s exceedingly well-told yarn, the magazine revealed that Finch was, in fact, an elaborate April Fool’s joke.

The idea that a human being could throw a ball 168 mph is implausible, but the part of the story that should have sounded alarms is that such a prodigious talent would go undiscovered and then, somehow, kept secret. Pro baseball players, like Sundance filmmakers, don’t come out of nowhere.

Of all the Sundance myths that developed over the last 35 years,...

Mark Harrison May 19, 2017

From the currently playing Their Finest to the likes of Bowfinger and Boogie Nights, we salute the movies about making movies...

If you haven't caught up yet, Their Finest is currently playing in UK cinemas and it's a gorgeous little love letter to perseverance through storytelling, set against the backdrop of a film production office at the British Ministry of Information during the Second World War. Based on Lissa Evans' novel, Gemma Arterton and Bill Nighy play characters whose access to the film industry has been contingent on the global crisis that takes other young men away from such trifling matters, and it's a real joy to watch.

Among other things, the film got us thinking about other films about making films. We're not talking about documentaries, even though Hearts Of Darkness, the documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now, may be the greatest film about...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson)

As we await Paul Thomas Anderson‘s next film later this year, one now has the chance to see his sprawling second feature about the world of pornography in a 70s and 80s Los Angeles on Netflix. Boogie Nights, which features much of the ensemble — including Mark Wahlberg, Julianne Moore, Burt Reynolds, Don Cheadle, John C. Reilly, William H. Macy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Heather Graham — at their best,...

Buckle up for a Cold War conspiracy when Operation Avalanche launches on DVD, Digital HD and On Demand January 3 from Lionsgate. Filmmaker and actor Matt Johnson stars alongside Owen Williams and Josh Boles as undercover CIA agents on a mission at Nasa in what Variety is calling “a wild rewrite of space-age history.” A film festival favorite,Operation Avalanche was an official selection at the SXSW Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Hot Docs, and Mammoth Film Festival. The Operation Avalanche DVD will be available for the suggested retail price of $19.98.

Official Synopsis

In 1967 two CIA agents go undercover at Nasa to investigate a possible Russian mole. In disguise as documentary filmmakers, they tap phones and break into offices while purporting to learn more about the Apollo project. But when they end up uncovering a shocking Nasa secret — and a major government cover-up — they decide to embark on a new mission...

Last year the The Globe & Mail released an article entitled "What is Wrong with the Canadian Film Industry?" that outlined the problems facing our country’s cinema: low box-office numbers, a crisis of English-Canadian identity, an inability to compete with Hollywood entertainments etc., etc. Focused entirely on the industry, the piece fails to mention the resurgence that had been taking root for quite some time. 2015 was an important year for Canadian cinema, but while Room, Hyena Road and Wet Bum ate up the article’s word count, three of the year’s great Canadian films by emerging directors went unnoticed: Isiah Medina’s 88:88, Kurt Walker’s Hit 2 Pass, and Kazik Radwanski’s How Heavy This Hammer. Equating cinema with ‘content,’ a product to be bought and sold, the article is as much a reflection of the problems with Canadian cinema as an exposition of it. But this insidious...

What if the moon landing was faked? What if it was an elaborate hoax constructed to maintain a sense of nationalist pride and to show that America has the upper hand in the world and beyond? This is a theory that has been around longer than I have been alive. Books and films have tried to unearth clues to support this claim. And even though most have accepted that the 1969 moon landing was indeed real, there’s still the tiniest hint of a voice inside some of us that asks, “What if?”

Matt Johnson reignites this fervor with his newest faux documentary. After the controversial but film festival-favorite The Dirties showcased the actor and director roaming the halls of a real high school with his partner Owen Williams, Matt Johnson decided to use his unique storytelling style to venture to a new, distant place and era. Operation Avalanche follows a...

Matt Johnson’s films could almost be described as half-truths or honest lies. They purposefully blur the line between fiction and non-fiction in such a fascinating way that you are never quite sure where the lie begins or ends. So it makes sense that my discussion with the young actor and director would include discussing the classic Orson Welles film F For Fake and why he enjoys injecting truths into stories… or maybe it’s the other way around.

After the controversial but film festival favorite The Dirties showcased the director roaming the halls of a real high school with his partner Owen Williams, Matt Johnson decided to use his unique storytelling style to venture to a new distant place and era. Operation Avalanche follows a group of CIA paper pushers as they attempt to orchestrate possibly the greatest hoax in human history: the 1969 moon landing. The group’s mission...

One of the biggest conversation starters from this year’s Sundance Festival was Matt Johnson’s Operation Avalanche, a fake documentary that recounts four men’s attempts to stage the 1969 Moon landing. Playing on one of the biggest conspiracy theories of the past century, the film is as enamored with the possibility of toying with history as it is with the rigorous aestheticism needed to convincingly depict the time period of the 60s.

Employing the same narrative format as Johnson’s previous film, The Dirties, Johnson and his team, including writer and creative partner, Owen Williams, cast themselves in this reproduction of alternate history. The result is a fascinating comedy-thriller, that also serves as a meticulous love letter to both the technology of the time period and cinema’s ability to obscure our perception of time and space.

In time for its expanded limited release, we had an expansive conversation...

Welcome back to the Weekend Warrior, your weekly look at the new movies hitting theaters this weekend, as well as other cool events and things to check out.

This Past Weekend:

Tom Hanks and Clint Eastwood’s real-life drama about airline pilot Sully (Warner Bros.) far surpassed all expectations, making nearly $10 million more than my prediction with an opening weekend of $35 million in 3,525 theaters, also making it one of the biggest openings for a movie opening the weekend after Labor Day. The Screen Gems thriller When the Bough Breaks disappointed compared to some of their similar releases, taking second place with around where we predicted with around $14 million. The lower profile animated film The Wild Life (Summit/Lionsgate) did end up in fifth place behind Don’t Breathe and Suicide Squad, but with a measly $3.3 million in 2,493 theaters. As expected, Relativity’s theatrical return with its own horror/thriller The Disappointments Room...

Now that the summer is cooling down, we’re entering perhaps the best time of year for cinephiles, with a variety of festivals — some of which will hold premieres of our most-anticipated 2016 features — gearing up. As we do each year, after highlighting the best films offered thus far, we’ve set out to provide a comprehensive preview of the fall titles that should be on your radar, and we’ll first take a look at selections whose quality we can attest to. Ranging from acclaimed debuts at Sundance, Cannes, and more, we’ve rounded up 25 titles that will arrive from September to December (in the U.S.) and are all well worth seeking out.

As a note, these didn’t make the cut, but you can see our reviews at the links: White Girl (9/2), Other People (9/9), London Road (9/9), Goat (9/23), Sand Storm (9/28), Do Not Resist (9/30), The Birth of a Nation (10/7), Desierto...

The Toronto International Film Festival's Primetime program, focusing on "high-quality television premieres," will see its second year when Tiff runs from September 8 through 18. Among the highlights: Episodes from the new season of Charlie Brooker’s anthology series, Black Mirror, featuring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Mackenzie Davis, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Alice Eve; three episodes from the third season of Jill Soloway's Transparent with Anjelica Huston, Jeffrey Tambor, Gaby Hoffmann, Amy Landecker, Jay Duplass, Judith Light, Cherry Jones, Rob Hubel, Alexandra Billings, Trace Lysette, Alexandra Grey, and Kathryn Hahn; and from Matt Johnson (The Dirties, Operation Avalanche), nirvanna the band the show. » - David Hudson...

The Toronto International Film Festival's Primetime program, focusing on "high-quality television premieres," will see its second year when Tiff runs from September 8 through 18. Among the highlights: Episodes from the new season of Charlie Brooker’s anthology series, Black Mirror, featuring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Mackenzie Davis, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Alice Eve; three episodes from the third season of Jill Soloway's Transparent with Anjelica Huston, Jeffrey Tambor, Gaby Hoffmann, Amy Landecker, Jay Duplass, Judith Light, Cherry Jones, Rob Hubel, Alexandra Billings, Trace Lysette, Alexandra Grey, and Kathryn Hahn; and from Matt Johnson (The Dirties, Operation Avalanche), nirvanna the band the show. » - David Hudson...

The Toronto Film Festival unveiled its Primetime program lineup Thursday, marking the Tiff’s second-ever television section. The five shows premiering include series from countries including the United Kingdom, Kenya, the Czech Republic and the U.S.

Read More: Why Tiff’s Midnight Madness Program Attracts Cinephiles From Around the World Every Year

The five TV premieres chosen for the lineup this year include two new installments of the U.K. anthology series “Black Mirror;” the third season of Jill Soloway’s Amazon series “Transparent”; an interactive procedural crime thriller from Kenya called “Tuko Macho;” the Czech mystery miniseries “Wasteland,” about a coal-mining village facing extinction; and the previously announced “nirvanna the band the show,” the TV adaptation of Matt Johnson’s (“The Dirties”) comedy web series about a two-piece Toronto band. Primetime will once again include Q&A sessions with show creators following each screening.

Choosing just five shows...

Every week, the CriticWire Survey asks a select handful of film and TV critics two questions and publishes the results on Monday morning. (The answer to the second, “What is the best film in theaters right now?” can be found at the end of this post.)

This week’s question: Fall movie season is right around the corner, and we can’t wait for the onslaught of good films to begin. What is the one movie coming out between now and December 31st that people should be sure to keep on their radar?

Christopher Campbell (@thefilmcynic) Nonfics/Film School Rejects

There are a number of great documentaries on their way to theaters this fall, but if I have to choose one to promote I pick Kirsten Johnson’s “Cameraperson.” It’s a hard sell if only because it’s so unique that it’s difficult to explain just how fresh and significant it is.

Operation Avalanche is the second feature from Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson whose indie comedy The Dirties gained a lot of attention a few years ago when it was embraced by Kevin smith who released the film through his Smodco film label.

A true DIYer with immense talent, Matt Johnson is also an open critic of the overly conservative Canadian film industry that refused to provide support for this film. Luckily for all of us, there are private entities who can actually recognize talent and understand that taking a risk on people can pay off in the long run. Unfortunately, Canada may have lost another great talent to the american system.

Synopsis:

In 19 [Continued ...]...

Set in 1967 at the height of the Cold War, “Operation Avalanche” follows two members of the CIA’s A/V team, Matt (Matt Johnson) and Owen (Owen Williams), who are investigating director Stanley Kubrick and his film “Dr. Strangelove” when they discover their employers are sending an agent into Nasa to hunt down a Soviet mole. Matt and Owen volunteer for the job saying that they’ll pose as documentary filmmakers making a movie about Nasa to suss out the mole. But when they arrive, they find out that Nasa is much farther away from landing on the moon than promised and are worried that they won’t be able to make President Kennedy’s deadline of decade’s end. So Matt and Owen concoct a crazy plan that just might work: They’ll fake the landing. Watch the trailer for the alt-history mockumentary below.

Read More: Sundance Review: ‘Dr. Strangelove...

Filmmaker/jester/rabblerouser Matt Johnson and his Toronto-based cohorts have been favorites around these here parts since their debut feature The Dirties won big out of Slamdance in 2013. A faux-documentary that charts the crumbling relationship between two high school movie geeks as one of them plotted a mass-shooting, The Dirties is filled with an exuberance and sense of humor that would seem to belie the core social issue at first blush. As such The Dirties remains one of the most vital and vibrant debut features of the aughts.  Per their penchant for guriella style shooting, resulting in hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage, their follow-up became the stuff of legend in indie film circles: Operation Avalanche is another faux-documentary, also starring Matt Johnson as Matt...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

After pulling off a documentary-style found-footage drama with their overlooked The Dirties, Matt Johnson and Josh Boles are back with Operation Avalanche. Set in the late ’60s, the Sundance drama finds four young C.I.A. agents convincing their superiors to send them undercover at Nasa, posing as a documentary film crew. It’s been set for a fall release, thanks to Lionsgate, and the first trailer has now arrived.

We said in our review, “Perhaps the most famous of all American conspiracy theories, Johnson and Boles’ docu-style rendering of the non-event feels confident and quick. These filmmakers have a knack for pacing, readily cutting out any fat from a given scene to keep the proceedings raw and gripping.”

Check out the trailer (via i09) and poster below for the film starring Matt Johnson, Owen Williams, Josh Boles, and Ray James.

In 1967, during the height of the Cold War, two...

Today is Canadian Film Day, meaning we are going to binge-watch films that were made right here at home, by talented Canadian filmmakers. If you want to take part in the celebration of our nation's cinema, you should definitely seek out these five titles, that represent some of the best film-making our country has to offer.

Canadian film has only been getting better as more talents emerge within our nation. We've got the token Canadian directors that everybody knows and loves, like David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, and Guy Maddin, but then there's a whole new crop of filmmakers, from the already legendary Xavier Dolan, and Sarah Polley, and newcomers Andrew Cividino (Sleeping Giant)and Matt Johnson (The Dirties).

It's cinematic visions like the ones we'll see in the list below that make us proud to be Canadian, and while these films are unique in their own right, their quality is...

Fearlessly and continuously reinventing yourself in an effort to powerfully uncover and explore society’s most significant issues in recent and modern times is a stance that not many people have the courage to take on. But filmmaker Matt Johnson intriguingly did just that in his new thriller, ‘Operation Avalanche,’ the compelling follow-up to his acclaimed and award-winning feature film debut that focuses on school bullying, the 2013 crime drama, ‘The Dirties.’ In his latest movie, the director and actor, who also worked on the story outline with his co-star, Josh Boles, effortlessly created a compelling faux-documentary about one of the greatest conspiracy theories in American history: whether Apollo 11 was [ Read More ]

The post SXSW 2016 Interview: Operation Avalanche’s Matt Johnson (Exclusive) appeared first on Shockya.com.

Matt Johnson's 2013 debut "The Dirties" boldly applied the overused found-footage approach to tell the story of a high school shooter. By those standards, his followup "Operation Avalanche" has more traditional aims, but it nevertheless confirms Johnson's ability to craft surprisingly engaging material out of an overused device. Read More: Review: High School Shootings In Kevin Smith-Released 'The Dirties' Put the Bully Problem In a Unique Spotlight Relying on a mashup of archival footage and staged bits, "Operation Avalanche" is a lively action-comedy period piece about a pair of bumbling would-be filmmakers hired by the CIA to fake the moon landing in the late sixties. Despite the inherent silliness of that premise, Johnson captures a unique climate of Cold War era paranoia while keeping the material fast and fun. As with "The Dirties," the new movie finds Johnson casting himself in the lead role and using his real name.

In 2013, Matt Johnson's The Dirties won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature at Slamdance. Now Johnson's at Sundance, his Operation Avalanche premiering in the Next program. And it's "essentially The Dirties 2.0," writes Ben Umstead at Twitch. "Again, Matt Johnson plays Matt Johnson. Owen Williams plays Owen Williams. Again, this is a faux-documentary. But this time, they aren't high school nerds in the 2000s, they're the best and brightest from top Ivy league schools, recruited by the C.I.A. in 1967." It gets complicated. We're collecting reviews as they come in. » - David Hudson...

In 2013, Matt Johnson's The Dirties won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature at Slamdance. Now Johnson's at Sundance, his Operation Avalanche premiering in the Next program. And it's "essentially The Dirties 2.0," writes Ben Umstead at Twitch. "Again, Matt Johnson plays Matt Johnson. Owen Williams plays Owen Williams. Again, this is a faux-documentary. But this time, they aren't high school nerds in the 2000s, they're the best and brightest from top Ivy league schools, recruited by the C.I.A. in 1967." It gets complicated. We're collecting reviews as they come in. » - David Hudson...

For all the criticism the found footage genre gets, like many a well-worn structure, there is still room to build. Operation Avalanche, from Matt Johnson and Josh Boles (The Dirties), aims to do just that and succeeds, for the most part.

In the late 60s, four young C.I.A. agents convince their superiors to send them undercover at Nasa, posing as a documentary film crew. Soon they learn that the mission to the moon is in jeopardy of pushing past 1969, thus faltering on JFK’s famed promise. Led by the ambitious Matt (Johnson), the “film crew” conspires to fake the moon landing.

Perhaps the most famous of all American conspiracy theories, Johnson and Boles’ docu-style rendering of the non-event feels confident and quick. These filmmakers have a knack for pacing, readily cutting out any fat from a given scene to keep the proceedings raw and gripping.

And yet, there is plenty to gripe about,...

Frequently, when I am writing a review, I will have to look someone up to jar my memory. I see so many films that it is possible for me to like something, even review it well, and then never think of it again. Such was the case with The Dirties. I actually went back today and read my review, and as soon as I did, I remembered all the things I liked about the movie and its director/star/co-writer Matt Johnson. The same things are true about Johnson's new film, Operation Avalanche, but even moreso, and I think Lionsgate stands a chance at turning it into a low-key hit if they handle it right. The Dirties was one of the rare found footage films where I thought the device was essential to the story and that the film commented on the notion of who is shooting and presenting the...