It can be difficult to capture the essence of a film in words, to encompass all that occurred on the screen within the confines of keystrokes. When done right, it is like experiencing a fragment of the film through the page and gives you just the right taste to make you want more. These 10 quotes do just that and are the perfect guide to discover which VIFF films are for you!
“Rips Austerity Britain a fresh one… An excellent documentary portrait of the band who are the voice of zero-hours Britain.”—Peter Bradshaw, Guardian
2. Vazante
“Transfixing in its formal rigor, impressive craft and striking visual beauty…[a] searing depiction of racial cruelty…There’s never a moment in this starch-free period piece that doesn’t feel fully inhabited or authentic.”—David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter
3. Happy End
“…a satirical nightmare of haute-bourgeois European prosperity: as stark, brilliant and unforgiving as a halogen light… It is also as gripping as a satanically inspired soap opera, a dynasty of lost souls…”—Peter Bradshaw, Guardian
“One of the freshest, funniest horror-comedies to emerge in Scream’s long wake. A key to the success of this giddily postmodern, subtly disturbing splatter-farce is its general disinterest in playing spot-the-reference, instead taking style cues from its own central pair of social media-obsessed high school serial killers, played with delirious commitment by [Shipp and Hildebrand].”—Andrew Barker, Variety
5. La Tenerezza
“Amelio is aiming right for our hearts… [He] has felt the call of an emotion, the ‘tenderness’ of the film’s title, that has the power to bludgeon through misunderstandings, hardships and stubborn wills like a bulldozer through a wall.”—Camillo De Marco, Cineuropa
“An expertly paced caper film with enough twists and turns to keep audiences in a heightened state of suspense.”—Variety
“Harvests quiet moments of humanity and poetry from… humdrum lives…This wry, compassionate female perspective on some uncomfortably familiar midlife male traits… repays the viewer in deadpan charm.”—Lee Marshall, Screen
8. Suck It Up
“Suck It Up twists the viewer’s emotions into a pretzel, constantly switching from laugh-out-loud moments to sheer sadness and back again… [It] provides a bevy of highly entertaining examples of how not to deal with the death of a loved one, as well as how not to take care of someone else dealing with the death of a loved one.” —Don Simpson, Hammer to Nail
9. The Party
“… A deliciously heightened, caviar-black comedy that sets up its brittle, bourgeois characters like bowling pins and gleefully knocks them down in 71 minutes flat… [This is a] consummate drawing-room divertissement, played with relish by a dream ensemble.”—Guy Lodge, Variety
10. Mountain
“[A] 70-minute rush of adrenaline; a safari into the sublime; a vertiginous voyage to the top of the world.”—Janine Israel, Guardian
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